DavidKahlVFX

Mimic Setup

Added 2019-01-25 13:24:28 +0000 UTC

You guys wanted a Mimic setup and I made one :)

Important to know is that this is fairly basic and there is much to improve. But it is a good place to start.

You have a toggle to activate the foot creation instead of the spear you see in the title image. The 2 foots you see in the image below were the 2 iterations I made to create them. You can draw the shape of the foot tentacles with a ramp on the control node. Thanks to a refine node the limbs are a tad lighter on the polycount.

Here is definetly some tuning neccessary - the change from limb to foot needs to be beveled. But the way I created the foot made it not so easy to do that. Maybe I tackle that another time.

Then you can control the amount and thickness of the tentacles on the body and the limbs. Thickness is being influenced through the pscale that is used in a polywire

And most importantly you can pose the setup by manipulating 2 points on the body and 3 points per limb. These points are then used to create the tentacles. All points are based on the head - so moving the head pulls everything with it.

But this setup has a major flaw and thats the position based detangle. Moving it will make the tentacles jump around since it tries to detangle it with changing seeds. That makes this more suitable for still images then an animation.

I bet there is a better way to solve this but again - it's a start. Here an example what happens when you change the position:

I do a short video about it later but I attach the file to this post - maybe you guys have some ideas to make it a bit more smooth before I put that video out there. ;-)

Cheers

Dave