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I'm having trouble with what should be a simple task: I want to animate a piece of paper being folded. I can make the folds I need easily enough, but I think I need an armature to achieve the animation. How can I snap the bone rotations to the fold axes, and should I use parenting with automatic weights?

Thank you for looking.

Lee

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Green Beetle
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  • You can animate with armature, where you need a bone per fold you want to make. You can constrain bone movement to 1 axis where it limits rotation to the fold you have on geometry once you have positioned and aligned the bone properly. But perhaps faster is to use shape keys. Also related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/6767/how-to-make-folding-origami-animation – kheetor Feb 28 '18 at 12:59
  • Thanks for commenting. Aligning/snapping the bone to the axis is one of my problems. I'm trying to find out the method for doing this. Shape keys cannot rotate a plane properly. They just move the vertices from on point to another. – Green Beetle Feb 28 '18 at 13:04
  • Snap the tail of the bone to 1 end vertice and the head to the other? You can use vertex snap in Armature edit mode or do this by snapping 3D cursor in Mesh edit mode. – kheetor Feb 28 '18 at 13:06
  • Also what you said about shape keys is correct, they do linear interpolation between the vertex locations so you couldn't really get away with using them in steps over 90 degree angle. But you could break the animation in smaller degree angles though and maybe get away with in on budget schedule :) – kheetor Feb 28 '18 at 13:23
  • I'll try the vertex snapping you suggest, and see how it goes, thanks. Not sure about breaking the animation down.. I'm impatient enough as it is. I'm always hoping for a short-cut! – Green Beetle Feb 28 '18 at 13:49
  • Ack. Snapping to the vertices is no good. The bones need to be at 90º to the fold. I need a general/beginners tutorial on aligning bones to non-XYZ axes... – Green Beetle Feb 28 '18 at 14:05
  • You shouldn't need that? You can align the "long" axis between head and tail and only rotate along that? But basically you align the bones by snapping the head and the tail any way you decide to do it. – kheetor Mar 02 '18 at 15:58

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