Rigging thick, fat and long structures with ICE

[Pancho]

I guess it is a general problem, but as I want to solve it with ICE (like all my rigging) I post it here. The problem is probably known, but I try to describe it.

A very fat and small man bends forward. A horse moves its head from a "watchtower" position down to the ground to eat grass. In both cases and others which are similar a simple bone chain in the position of the spine or neck won't work alone. Even with a lot of enveloping the result tend to be shabby. Thin long man, no problem, but a small fat one? Where is all the fat going in front of the body? It needs to be pushed away if the guys bends forward. I don't want a simulation, but a rigging approach. Otherwise the fat from the breast will be pushed through the fat of the belly at one point. The same for the long neck. If I use simple bone rigging, the lower side of the neck looks plain ugly. A kind of tendon or muscle would be needed to shape this area properly, like a rubber band.

What are the possibilities to deal with these issues? The further away the structure is from the bone or envelope null, the more difficult it gets.

Any ideas?

Cheers
Thomas

[Pancho]

Alomst 100 hits, but no reply? There should be ways to do this?! The same applies for a horse, cat or lion. While the spine is positioned almost at the top of the back. The rib cage is pretty far away from the spine. If the spine bend in an extreme way the ribs would spread open in a very unrealistic way. Same problem, weighting and enveloping alone don't do it what a the tricks and principals to do this?

[Mathaeus]

if I understand correctly, this is similar to overlapped extrusion along curve. Afaik, solution is somewhere in area of recipes, don't believe there is 'principle'. So one recipe in 'standard' XSI kinematics would be: draw a linear curve, create clusters with centers, parent them to first and last segment of spine, at some distance. Create a nulls and evenly constrain them on curve, use these nulls as targets for direction constraints, drive rotation of spine segments with direction constraints.

[edschiffer]

for me the best solution would be the easy possibility of sculpting when the rig reaches desirable positions, much like Blender is doing:



that would simplify enveloping and rigging so much...