I have a model of a dog character (unrigged) that i want to animate with legs that procedurally react to the keyframed animation of the torso. Essentially behaving like a marionette, with the main body being rigid, while the legs attached have soft body physics, only translating and rotating from the joint where the body and legs meet.
I have tried separating the mesh into the torso and the legs, doing some parenting and assigning soft body physics (i also tried rigid body) to the legs.
The issues I ran into:
- The legs being "ripped" from the main body. (see picture) I want the legs mesh to deform and stretch while still being attached to the vertexes of the main body.
- The legs not rotating from the starting point of the leg, rather just "floating" relative to the main body.
To be clear, I want the leg movement to be completely procedural. I only want to puppeteer the torso, which will pull the legs with it.
My goal is to make it look intentionally fake, as if an invisible hand was dragging the puppy model with jelly legs.
My crude attempt at demonstrating the desired effect: