Odd Diver

This deep sea explorer has no plans of returning to the surface.

I challenged myself with the tentacle rig as I’m a huge fan of the Lovecraftian aesthetic and knew it would be an asset I’d use often in work to come. All these assets will be posted so that other people can also make use of them.

Some notes about the controls because tentacles are very strange things…

The tentacles have two modes for bending One is based on spline and one is based on IK. Each Contorl tip of a tentacle has a toggle for which method is being used (that control is the cube at the end of each tentacle.)

The main Con_Tentacles control has sliders in the properties for defining whether the tentacle is more a child of the Con_Tip or more a Child of the Con_Main which is the central body control where the diver helmet is.

There are another set of sliders on the inner Con_Angle These are for actually removing the child to the Con_Main if you want a tentacle to not be affected by the main body.

Now one major challenge I encountered when animating with all my iterations of this rig is that if the body is rotated to far then the limbs loose reference for rotation and it breaks the rig. I spent many hours toiling over a solution for this and I couldn’t really find one in the rig itself. I had to resort to making an external control for the armature itself which is an empty called  Armature_OddDiver-Turn_OBJ. With this object you can rotate the rig itself to resolve the issue with the tentacles breaking, but the animation will need to account for all of the bones being rotated. Not Ideal in the least, and If I ever find a solution to this I will update the rig file.

The rope knots are made of curves and have hook ends that control the position and shape of the knots.