I am doing some rigging on my goat and was wondering if something is possible.

Can I have a fan bone "orient like" another bone lets say 80% about "Z", 50% about "Y", and 20% about "X"?

Or is there another way I'm not seeing to make a fan more flexible in one direction and more restricted in the others?

Or is there a way to limit the rotation to "orient like" in one plane only and shut the others off?

I think this could help me with the neck and shoulder joints.

Thanks,

Could you not just use waighting with the fann bone

I can weight the CP's to get close.

Let me try to explain the effect I want and maybe there is a better way to get there than I can think of.
I am really green at rigging.

Assume I have two bones as parent and child to create a simple joint.
There is a tube around the bones and its CP's are assigned to the bones.
By fan bones, weighting CP's, or any other method available I would like the following.
When I rotate the tip of the child bone in a circle I want the CP's to follow in an elliptical path.
SO if I move the child bone up and down the CP's follow 80% but side to side the CP's follow only 20%.
I would want the motion to blend between so that each CP is moving with a sort of eliptical influence.

Thanks

I think I understand what your saying ,maybe you could get that with smartskinn ,say have the bone at 45% and set the mesh in smartskinn at around 20%say in the x and keep it normal in the other axis
not sure ,Iv never triede it .hopefully Mark or David will explain it

My first thought is that some nested bones with different constraint %s and some euler constraints so that each constraint would slide in only one direction might get this done. This is probably the most bulletproof solution but I haven't thought it through completely.


Second thought... you can use smartskin to make ANY bone do ANYTHING in regards to the rotation of another bone. It isn't just for CPs.

In this example I keyed "slave" to be 45° left and right when "master" is 45° left and right, but only 15° up and down when "master" is 45° up and down.

Click to view attachment


It's pretty close. Of course in the above I presume I'll never want to make "master" swing more than 45°. You have to know your maximum angles before you do the smartskin keys.


onion skin view of master on right and slave on left

Click to view attachment


smartskinning a bone that CPs are attached to will be much easier than smartskinning the CPs directly.

Well I didn't know you could smartskinn the bone ,that could be very handy .Learning all the time ..slowly

An Euler limit can do that. You'd set the max and min angles for one axis to 0°.

I believe it needs to be lower on the list than the orient constraint to have precedence over it.

Thanks for the feedback.
I like your solution Robcat.
I'll have to give it a go when I get home.

Smartskin may be the best solution still, but I want to learn how to make the blends very predictable.

Thanks again,

OK, I've been playing with this tonight and I got to say that learning to smartskin bone movements gives a whole new level of adjustment I never new was possible.

Thanks for helping me out guys.

Thanks Robcat for making me an example to follow. That was great.

I think I am on my way...until the next snag.