I rigged this little bracket with hooks, and thought they were working as intended, but I'm stuck at having the controls pinned exactly where the hook was originally placed.
I tried a number of constraints, and adding an extra parent in object mode, but it breaks right away. I'm guessing a dependency cycle of some sort? 🤔
The last hook on the modifier stack has all vertices attached to it so I can move the mesh without deforming anything. Parented to the root bone.
I mean, it works. But it's going into a large bracket, and it'll get tricky having all the brackets controls on top of each other at the world origin 🥴
Any insight on what step I missed, or how to fix it?
Also, any idea how to make the controls follow the mesh? The Top and Bottom bones work, but if I move the bracket up, the widgets remain at the original axis.
Sorry, lots of questions on this one. Or if you think there's a smarter solution to this that doesn't involve hooks, I'm also all ears.
Sorry I'm at work and YouTube isn't playing for some reason. You don't need a hook for all vertices. You can simply add an empty and parent all the hooks to it. Unless you're parenting to an armature. Each hook is parented to a bone then you add an extra root bone and parent all the bones to it.
I'd go thru and clear all parenting from the mesh/curve, empties and armature. The mesh pieces follow the hook object(empties in this case) so no need to parent it to anything. The empties can then be parented to a controlling bone(one for each hook). Then in the armature you can add an extra bone to parent all the bones to and use as a root bone. Then when you go into pose mode and move the bones the hook empty follows along with whichever vertices assigned to the hook.
Side note: you can remove empties and actually assign the armature to each hook. It will then let you choose which bone to use for the hook. In the future you can also select bone in pose/edit mode. Then in object mode select armature, then select mesh, tab into edit mode select vertices and press Ctrl+h. I don't remember if it says to bone or to selected object.
I'm home and was finally able to watch the video. Yeah just parent top controller to up controller and bottom to down. If you get some weird shifting of the arms that is because you have vertices assigned to both hooks. Based on what I see in the video you will have that problem. I'd be surprised if you didn't. Then select the mesh, tab into edit mode. You can select the vertices you want to be assigned to a hook and then click on the assign button on the hook modifier. This will wipe out all other vertices data and replace it with just the selected. It doesn't work like vertex groups where it adds to it.
Opinion: From what I've seen of the video it looks to me that this would be easier with just normal weighting to bones. Unless you're just wanting to learn more about hooks. Which can be REALLY useful when working with curves.
Thank you Dwayne! I'll give it a try today and see if it fixes it. I definitely have vertices assigned to more than one hook.
I might also just do it with the regular weights, although you are right, I was hoping to learn more about rigging with hooks, but this is being more complicated than it needs to be.
dillenbata3, with just regular bones and weights I could get it done in 15 minutes. No heads banging on walls. Thanks for the insight on limiting the use of hooks to curves and simulations!
Hooks are also good when you're exporting to another program but want the bendy bone effect.