Limits of the IK chain

I’ve been trying to make a chain that goes around a set of gears. I used the “roller coaster” demo to build my IK chain. It works fine for 3 or 4 links but my chain is about 30 links long. Once I get past 7 links the program becomes to over loaded.

Is there a limit to the number of IK links you can have? And is there a work around to this? I just want to be able to have multiple objects follow the same path but at different point.

Hitting a wall here
thanks!

Hi Jason,

In theory there is no limit but in practice indeed, long chains in particular lots of linked constraints makes the software overloaded.
Unfortunately I can’t offer you a workaround.

Luc

I looked at your post about animating materials and this will be a good workaround for my project. I need something thats VERY light weight as my computer is not very fast, but can give the impression of movement to an animation. Here’s what I came up with
SURFACE_CHAIN.3dm (330.4 KB)

I have another question though. I’ve been playing around with recording history and having a lot of fun. I want to get this surface to be effected by this wave curve (see attached file). Just like the watch band file you guys posted. But in this one I need the surface to stay static.SURFACE_WAVE.3dm (73.0 KB)

Any recommendations?

Nice going.

Don’t know how you built your ribbon. I rebuilt it using ‘Sweep1’ which gives less deformation of the surface’s isocurves, and hence les deformations of the “dots”.
SURFACE_CHAIN 001.3dm (221.7 KB)

Pleased to hear you’re having a lot of FUN :yum:
How about this attempt SURFACE_WAVE 001.3dm (103.4 KB)

I disabled the ClippingPlane’s edge show in the Display’s Options, in order to get the best “illusion”.


My motto : “Animation is make believe.”

That will work for making the wave surface–I haven’t used clipping planes before.

Here’s what I came up with for the chain. I just made my chain curve with my box constrained–then duplicated it 10 times. I used the keyframe editor to offset the positions

CHAIN_WORKAROUND.3dm (139.7 KB) of each box.
its much simpler than building IK chains and is very very light weight for my computer.

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