Rigging Ideas - Zipper Rig

I had another request on the forum im part of asking how we can lower the number of joints on a close up zipper rig. I thought hey why not an excuse for another rigging blob subject. I thought i would share this idea. Its nothing new it more the skinning i wanted to show off here.

In the example i have used a series of hidden locators and matrix constraints. But any method to snapping the tracks together will do. For the skinning part. In this example I've modelled a very quick zipper with the tracks being separated. Bare in mind you can keep everything combined and selection skin each piece, this was modelled intentionally for this tutorial.

Here i have placed joints to every third track. to lower the amount of influences needed to open up and close the tracks.

next i create a plane to act as a proxy skin that i can later transfer to the model track.

if you skin joints to this, you should get something like this.

Then you can simply copy the left, right proxy skin weights across to the respected zip track model.

And hey presto, you're done just in time for you third-forth coffee ;) As usual reach out if you need further help. Happy rigging. Jase