An easy one for you....I hope

[AntManley]

(Maya)
This is probably the most easiest thing to do, but I can't find any information anywhere to do it. Essentially I have a stretchy arm setup using scale constraints on the IK/FK chains.

The constraints can be turned off from effecting the CTRL jnt chain using an SDK on the IK and FK hand controllers. BUT, its only the scaleX constraints that have been turned off from the main arm CTRL bones, the scaleX ctrls still work.

So:
Mode (controls the scale constraint weights on the CTRL chain)
ShoulderStretch (feeds directly into the corresponding jnt scaleX e.g FK_L_SHOULDER.scaleX)

So without saying a load of gobbeldy gook, I don't want an animator to turn off the stretchy influence on the FK/IK arms (expecting the stretch to stop completely) and then unknowingly select and move the stretch controls, effecting the stretch on FK/IK arms, but not the CTRL chain.

So my question is simply this:

Is this a way to drive the lock/keyeable value of a custom attribute, by another custom attribute?

So ideally:
(These two are on the same NurbsCtrl)

STRETCHY
Mode = 0 (0= stretch off)
ShoulderStretch = lock/non keyeable

Mode = 1 (1= stretch on)
ShoulderStretch = Unlocked/keyeable

Any info is much appreciated. Cheers!

[zombiez]

So we could use this stretchy arm rig to create a Mr. Fantastic Model? As in the character whose body is extendable. Lots of characters for that:
Mr. Fantastic
Elastic Man
Elongating man
Also if we use sand as the material construct for the arm we get Sandman's long arm shots at Spiderman.
Just a few ideas. Not exactly info related.

[AntManley]

Originally Posted by zombiez

So we could use this stretchy arm rig to create a Mr. Fantastic Model? As in the character whose body is extendable. Lots of characters for that:
Mr. Fantastic
Elastic Man
Elongating man
Also if we use sand as the material construct for the arm we get Sandman's long arm shots at Spiderman.
Just a few ideas. Not exactly info related.

Not bad ideas that, I'm still a novice at rigging, I setup this system because I wanted to give the animators on my film a more precise stretch control, its works fantastic in FK mode, but the main problem lies with the above. There is a huge risk for accidental keying of the still active stretch controls once the influence to the CTRL chain has been turned off.

The IK individual joint stretch works in a fashion, but it warps the IK handle position something fierce, if I could only work out a way to turn off the calculations of a multiplydivide and a condition node, I could use the fahrenheit stretch solution and have a more intuitive ik lead stretch control as opposed to my individual joint stretch.