Hello,
After finding out that an IK chain has limitations (see "too many objects?")
I went back to the "drawing board" and tried to find another way. After
almost two weeks of frustrating experimentation, think I may have found a
solution.
See my new post "Progress on IK snake" in moray.binaries.
I made a chain with 5 bending sections and 6 straight sections. The straight
sections are made of one cylinder followed by 8 or 17 copies, which are
reference objects. the bending sections are made of 9 or 18 cylinders in IK
chain mode. The trick to making this work correctly (which is what took me
the longest time to figure out) is that when a cylinder is added to a
straight section, its freeze modifiers are initially set to indicate its new
location. These settings have to be changed in order to copy and paste the
new links in the chain. However, after that new section of cylinders is
created, you have to go back to the freeze modifiers for that first one and
change the translation (for X in this example) back to what it was at first.
If that is not done, as soon as the IK is used, the new section will move
itself to the last referenced object in the chain. Not good!
Next I have to try this with my snake-scale body sections. Then I have to
try to make the head. That will be a whole big project all by itself.
Steve Shelby

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