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Hi folks,

I would be very glad to find some help here.
What I have to animate is a tentacle squid arm, that makes a special roundish gesture on the end of the tip to grab something. Inside the arm are many vertebras close to each other.

To control the arm I think bones with FK could be the way. I tried a setup with few bones. To get a smooth control object for the vertebras and the envelop I tried a control spline constrained to the bones. Now I have something to attach the smoother envelop to. But: As to be seen in picture C the mesh ist twisting. Ahhh.

Is there a better way to get a well controlable sguid arm (picture A) with many smooth substeps for vertebras ans envelope?

greetings,
Schlex

Instead of using a control spine you could use a enveloped nurbs strip with nulls constrained along the length, orientated to normals, as it provides solid control over the twisting.

Hi. Thank you. This sounds good. Could you explain more in detail please? I am not that firm with nurbs.

Now I got it. It works. Thank you for thinking around the corner.)

Sorry, didn't get any email notifications of replies, and was slammed today - glad you got it working!

Glad you helped me. It is working really fine.

A nurb strip! Genious, I would have never thought.

The alternative is creating a number of upvectors for your chains (so that you could potentially also have IK tentacles) and still have rotational control (and less flipping)