Deforming neon accessories with an animated rig

[Simoon68]

Seasons greetings!

We have a great white shark rig that is animated via a bone structure. I have created some Christmas lights that wrap around the shark and change colour. However they are separate mesh parts as they need to be the neon material in order to glow.

Welding the lights to shark isn’t the challenge here however having the lights (and green wire) deform with our shark animation is the problem, as the shark swims the lights and wire remain static:

Does anyone know the best way to approach this, would caged deformation work? If anyone is willing to share their knowledge on this, please feel free to shoot me a DM or comment as I would be happy to share the rig.

Many thanks,

Simoon

[HTCSCraft (HTo_o)]

assuming the Christmas lights were made in blender, you could apply the same bone structure and animations to it, then just adjust the weight. Then, you could weld it to the shark and play both animations (for the shark and the Christmas lights) at the same time. Hope this helped!