Help with rigging a different kind of stem joint

[ChrisM]

I know I was probably going to get in trouble when I decided to try a different lamp design but I guess this is good for learning too!

Hopefuly someone here can… shed some light on the issue

So this is my lamp. As you can see in the image below, instead of using a ball as a joint my lamp uses a ‘side to side’ wood strip.

So when creating the armature I came across a problem that I tried to illustrate in the image below. Since the wood strips or stems are not aligned, how should I create the bones here to avoid problems later when animating while having an accurate rotation of the pieces?

[SteRobWms]

Here’s what I would do. Create an extra bone for each offset joint and lock it in place on all axes. This is what I did for my slightly-offset ball joint. In the screencap, I exaggerated the offsets to make it easier to see the bones. Yours will be much, much smaller. There may be another way to offset bones, but I have not yet found it.

[ChrisM]

Hey thanks a lot for lending a hand!

I’m trying that at the moment and my lamp is not responding well after that. I mean it changed to a weird pose and if I rotate the view it seems that the light cone is following my point of view around. Maybe if I try rebuilding my armature again from scratch I can make it work.

[ChrisM]

It worked!
So I tried following your advice parenting the bones from scratch and apparently it’s working, at least to a basic degree when I rotate the bones, and the movement seems fine.

Thanks again

[SteRobWms]

Good deal! I almost went with an atypical design, myself, so I am glad to see one working out.