Rigging a comedy mechanical boxing glove
 

Hi all,

For a shot in a short film I'm working on I want a typical comical boxing glove to fly out and hit my character but i'm not sure how to go about rigging it so the mechanism is easy to animate. I've tried bones and IK but so far no joy. I have attached a super high resolution render of the idea I mean done in Paint. The idea is that when the 2 points indicated by the arrows are pushed in, the mechanism extends.

Thanks in advance
All the best
Simon

Quick&Dirty
 

Hiya..

on the first impression - it sounds not so hart to achieve - till i started to played around with the idea...hehe

I came up with a simple rigid bind. Bound each bone to the correct part of the geomerty and connected the rotationaxis via set driven key to each other. This will look ok cause it's a linear movement.

So the job is only some connecting. In the test I started with the rotation of the root joint as my first key. That moves the whole piece. Since a translation of the root joint in x, y or z will move the whole rig I would recommend to bring in a locator or some geometry to start the initial movement.

There are defiantly many more elegant solutions via mel, but as long as you don't know how to work with expressions- it's useless. In my opinion it's no real help to copy another guys script without having a clue how it works. So my strong advice : Get used to mel. It's so powerful and can save you a hell of work.

hope that helps


cheers

Mac

wow thanks a lot! I'll give this a go later on today. Thanks for all your help!

Simon