Car Rigging Part 4: Chain Rigging

When embarking on the task to rig up a vehicle its a good idea to consider the other secondary animations at play for example rotors, belts, chains ect...

In this instance i have used a ik spline handle using the offset to drive the behaviour.

I have connected the wheel drive attribute into pi * 2r node setup to compensate for the length of the chain. To avoid flipping im using advanced twist with rotation up and a locator up vector in the middle of the curve driving the joints.

If you draw out a curve you can use the following script create joints and place them around the curve. I used a ::skip_amount this will skip to the second, third ect... vert to place a joint onto.

import maya.cmds as cmds

def place_joints_along_crv(crv, skip_amount):
    
    crv_pnts = cmds.getAttr(crv[0] + '.cv[*]')
    cmds.select(cl=True)
    
    for pnt in crv_pnts[::skip_amount]:
        jnt = cmds.joint(p=(pnt[0], pnt[1], pnt[2]))
    
if __name__ == "__main__":
    place_joints_along_crv(cmds.ls(sl=True), 1)

any questions feel free to reach out.

Jason