I gave up on trying to use modular rigs or IK rigs for the mantis bot ( see https://willkolb.com/?p=1239) and I I just manually made my own control rig. This is EXACTLY what I did for the patrol bot awhile back. This time around I wanted I convinced myself that last time was an lack of knowledge that I brute forced around but I’m now thinking for anything that is NOT: human, symmetrical, rigged by epic games etc. you cannot use modular rigs and you MUST make you’re own control rigs.

“Okay that seems like not a big deal why do you care?” Fair question. I would classify a Modular rig as 3rd grade geometry where there’s a bunch of pretty buttons and shapes that you can drag/drop into the scene:

Control rigs are the math that someone for Babylonia made in 2000bc and was discovered by some guy in Europe 1000 years later who couldn’t figure out what was happening until a genius found out they could use that math to make lightning.

Long story short, the control rig is the output of the modular rig”and if making a modular rig fails then you need to build out your control rig yourself. In my case it wasn’t that bad (but that was because of my previous experience with the bot).

Above is the construction script which takes those red circles from the rig and puts them under each of the legs.

This segment is the forward solve section where IK is applied to each limb. Honestly not that bad to make but the mental gymnastics I was doing to basically say “hey this easy thing (modular rigs) should be easy” made me rip my hair out for a few hours.

The final result:

This worked out so much better now I just gotta make like 30 animations and we should have a good boss room fight.

Here’s a few that I was able to get done pretty quickly:

Cut me some slack on that last one, might move it to be more physics based rather than animating whatever I guessed to be gravity.