Digital Art Zone

Without resorting to physics, since I’m going to be doing animations and that would introduce a level of complication that was hard to manage from what I recall in the past, what’s a good way to connect two figures or parts with something flexible like a rope - say reins going from hand to horse’s neck, or horse’s neck to carriage its towing behind?

Is there a way to make each end track target helpers?
Or if I parented a target helper t each end and made one a parent and the other a child, could I use IK to control those ends and I guess make the rope into a soft body (so I guess some physics after all, but as long as each end is fixed, might bot be a problem)

Any suggestions are welcome.  Doesn’t have to be super realistic, just look nice.

bone it!
then use track modifiers on the ends
bit of fiddling involved, tracking target helpers rather than the figure also a good idea.
to bone it, just drag bones along it and attach skeketon and use ball joints in the ik restraints
was a good thread on this in the old forum but I cannot get it on my android, someone else might link it, someone wanted to drag a box behind Vicky on a string.

yeah, I think I was involved in that thread - asking questions and following, probably not providing the good ideas -;-)

Will try to track that down

Will experiment with your suggestions too with some simple objects.

I would go rigged as Wendy suggested. Taking the analogy of the horse, you could parent the one end of the reign to the hand holding it and parent targets to the bridle where the reins connect, then have the end of the reins track the bridle targets.

Think I have this working, at least on a proof of concept level.

I added bones to a rope like prop, and added ball joint constraints.
(DimensionT has a nice tutorial for rigging and constraints for anyone who needs it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4N2jx0gc5I )
This gives nice looking movement via the IK chain.

I then parented one end to a sphere (but this could just as well be a Target Helper attached to a figure’s hand in animation).
And on the last bone, I added a Track Modifier which tracks Target Helper 2 in x, y, and z - that Target helper could then be positioned at need and parented to horse’s head for reins or to a crate or wagon for dragging.

Will test out in real setting when I get a chance.

Thanks so much for the suggestions & help.

One more question.  This current method allows me to essentially pin both ends of a rope and have IK handle the middle.

What would be a good way to gain some control over how the middle of that rope looks (for instance, if I want the rope to hang down in the middle or I want it to bulge up or to the side)

Adding a track modifier to one of the middle bones for a third Target Helper seems to work.
Is that a good way to do it, or was there some other way?  I seem to remember some kind of pointers or targets to get the knees going in the right direction with figures but don’t remember how it worked or if it would apply to this situation.

Adding a point modifier instead of Track also has some effect but seems harder to control. 
Thanks

If you want the reigns to hang down, then select a bone somewhere in the middle and simply drag it down. Once the curve is set that way, any flex in the rig will want to go that way (at least in my experience). As to having a bulge in the or side, I would think it would work the same way.

I made a thirty foot hose for this image and rigged it with two bones per foot of hose. It was pretty unwieldy, so in the future I’ll do a shorter length and hide the end, but I essentially controlled it the way I suggested and it worked okay, except for the slow reaction time from having Carrara calculate the IK of an overly large rig.

Wendy:
was a good thread on this in the old forum but I cannot get it on my android, someone else might link it, someone wanted to drag a box behind Vicky on a string.

That was me!
Here is the thread:
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=181750&view=previous

-Ingvar

thx, Ingvarai, for some odd reason, my Android browser will not open the archived forum since they “fixed” it.
I could before by adding archive after forum in the url of links found using Googlesearch but now I cannot access it at all on my Galaxy tab, can on desktop but rarely browse on that!