Flexies and glueing stuff to both ends.

Did an experiment today. I had this thought, why not make furry ears that where "attached" on the head, but where the other end was attached to an invisible rod and ball, so that when you rotate the ball, the tip of the ear would move, and the rest of the ear with it. The experiment consisted of 3 boxes, one on the ground, one flexi, and one on the top. Link, move the group, watch it **fail** miserably. So.. Anyone know is a) there is some way to ge this to work, b) if making the IK chain for this work right is something in the books on the JIRA, and/or c) there is some way around it.

BTW, for those not familiar with IK-chain, this refers to how you have object A, to which B is linked, and then C is linked to B, so that if you rotate A, B and C move with it, while, if you move B, only C moves., like a chain:

rotate A 180 from A---B---C to get C---B---A, rotate B 90, and get:

C
|
|
B---A

This is how "normal" 3D apps usually work, but, it would seem that one end of a flexy will "flat out" refuse to recognize that something is connected to it. This would include anything from the rod on the ear I planned, to someone wanting to place a bow on their tail (unless they cheat and use solid parts, with script).

Any ideas about this? It kind of creates an annoying limitation on making realistic.. well, anything where the "skin" needs to flex, instead of robots.

Sorry, there's no IK or for that matter any kind of hierarchy when linking prims. A linked prim is either the root, or a child of the root, period.


edit: even worse (for your situation), flexi prims are a purely client-side effect so the simulator has no idea where the free end of a flexi prim even is, so there's no way for another prim to track its movement.

Ah man, you breaking my heart! Seriously though, it creates a whole mess of annoying issues. Though, I have to wonder how "muzzle talk" works if this is the case, since its using an existing AV head, then linking in new parts, including a new point of rotation for the jaw... Going the have to look at that again I guess.

Muzzletalk works with a seperate jaw linkset. I've adapted several furry avas recently to use it.

Essenitially, you mod the head to have no lower jaw, and to have upper pallette and teeth. The you make a lower jaw, with teeth and tongue, which has an invisible sphere prim whee you want the pivot point for the jaw. That sphere is the root prim for the jaw.

The head attaches in its normal position (usually skull), while the jaw attaches at the mouth position. You adjust the position of each so the jaw looks right when not talking. The typing AO in the jaw then makes it move when you type text chat or talk in voice chat.