Tnt - Tentacles and tails rigging utility tutorial

Welcome! In this tutorial, I'll demonstrate how to use our Tentacles and Tails rigging utility. TnT is used to simplify the rigging process when creating long flexible appendages like tentacles or tails. In this tutorial, I'll use TnT to help rig the rope on this grappling hook figure. In order to use TnT on a figure, you need to create an initial rig which i've already done here for the grappling hook. It consists of three bones: the knot, which is the base of the figure, the grappling hook, and the rope. You can see that the rope is currently a single bone so it bends as a single unit. Normally, if we want this to be as flexible as a real rope is, it would need to have several hundred bones which would be very tedious to create manually. So instead we'll let TnT automatically regroup the rope and create the bones for it. To work with TnT, a figure needs to be set up in a certain way. First, the bones need to be high enough resolution. TnT will only regroup existing polygons and won't create any additional geometry. Polygons for the bone also need to be in a single group. In this case, they're all in the rope group. TnT will replace the original bone with a chain of new bones, so make sure that the original bone starts and ends where you want the bone chain to start and end. Once the initial rig is complete, then save your figure into your Poser figures library. Then open up the TnT utility and choose the CR2 file that you just saved. Then set the rest of parameters for your figure. "Base bone name" is the original name of the bone you wanto to make into a flexible object. The default as tentacle but in this case we named it rope. "Control actor" will determine where the EZ-Pose dials are. Usually, you can just leave this at body. The "Level of control" parameter will determine how many levels of control you have in the EZ-Pose dials. The more bones your figure will have, the higher you want to make this. The control names should match the dial names in the original bone. In this case, the original ones are correct. The number of bones you want will depend on how long your object is and how flexible you want it to be. In this case, since the robe is long and pretty flexible, I'm going to use 99 bones. And i'm also going to increase the level controls so we have a bit finer control on the object. Lastly, if you've already regrouped the object, you can uncheck the "regroup object" button and TnT won't break up the object any further. In this case, we need it to do the regrouping, so we'll leave that checked. Then click on the "Create tentacle" button to start the process. Befor TnT does anything else, it'll ask you where you want to save the new objects. I'm just going to save these in the same location as the original. TnT will then break up the object and rerig it. Now this can take several minutes depending on how many bones you create how complicated the object is. Once TnT has finished running, you can go back into Poser and load the newly rerigged object. And here we have our fully rigged grappling hook. As you can see in the body, we have a new rope parameter which gives you dials that help you pose the entire rope all at once. You can also use the multiple levels of control to move just part of the rope at once. And that concludes our tutorial on how to use our Tentacles and Tails rigging utility.