animate curtain hooks - brain breaker

[Tom Hamelrijckx]

Hi all...

 

Attached you see a rudimentary animation of some curtain hooks, moving one after the other along a spline (the rail). Pay particular attention on the specific delayed movements in the beginning; hook 2 only starts moving when hook 1 is at a certain distance on the rail, and so on...

 

I did this animation, putting a key on every hook, every 5 frames more or less, only to give you a show of what I want to reach.

 

The actual end result however, wil be a longer path, a longer animation duration, way more hooks, and above all, a specific management of where and when the first hook will be positoned throughout the animation (the other hooks will follow accordingly to the specific curtain movement).

 

Giving these circumstances, I impossibly can put a key on every hook separately during the whole animation, so I thought maybe this could be done with a bone system & IK solver, constrained on the path.

 

Since I don't have any experience with this, I really don't have any clue on how to implement it, so I could use some tips and techniques with this.

 

Sorry for the zip file, but the uploader didn't accept wmv...

[ATTACH]43871[/ATTACH]

Edited July 22, 2011 by Mazinger

[Tom Hamelrijckx]

... this seems very very very difficult...

[notamondayfan]

Can you upload the video to youtube or vimeo? I don't like downloading zips from forums.

 

Anyway, even without seeing the animation, I can guess at what you are trying to achieve.

 

I would either keyframe one hook, then duplicate it and offset the animation for each hook.

 

Maybe you could use the wireparameters (I presume you are using Max?) to code the animation, but I'm unsure how you would go about it.

 

My preference would be to keyframe, it wouldn't take that long, and you are guaranteed it will look correct.