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  • what's the best way to rig a rubber band

wondering what's the best approach to rig this kind of thing, it's basically an endless mesh strip, in my test I was trying to set up a path constraint, didn't work out as intended, I simply want a path to control the mesh with binding to a bunch of bones, but have no idea how to set up such without having path constraint involved, so I can easily animate the rubber band with simply controlling the path point.

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    geee From your purpose, it would be better to use path constraints. It is difficult to explain the setup using path constraints in words alone, so I have created an example project for you:

    example-band.zip
    50kB

    The example project has two skeletons: one that is supposed to animate the band by moving path vertices directly, and one that is supposed to animate the band by moving bones bound to the path. You can take whatever method you are comfortable with, but I think it is probably easier to use bones because bones are easier to select than path vertices.

    Important things of the example setup:

    • The mode of Spacing of the path constraint is set to Proportional and the Spacing value is set to 100. This places the bones spaced to take up the entire path.
    • The mode of Rotate Mix is set to Chain Scale. Chain Scale first rotates the bone so it points at the next position along the path, determined by spacing, then it scales the bone so the tip is at that position. When using Chain Scale, all of the constrained bones should have the same parent or the first bone should be the parent of the rest of the bones. In the example project, I set the bones with the former setup.

    I hope this will help you.