Divine Spine

Found yet another option for spine rigging online known as "The Divine Spine". I've had a read through it and it appears it's divinity comes under immediate question because it is infact a cross breed (or a mongrel) of the Isner and the Ribbon spine's (some may argue its a hybrid).


The initial setup resembles a spinewave rig - dense joint chain, spline ik, arc len node connected to a multiply divide node to calculate the stretch. Then another joint chain - with fewer links placed in the areas where deformation should occur is created, that is snapped to the spline. The spline is then skinned to the new joint chain, which now controls the initial joint chain, which in turn calculates the interpolation.

This is similar to the ribbon spine - when you examine its attributes is very similar to a spline Ik, it just uses a nurbs patch to give you the interpolation rather than the spline of the ik handle. 

But the Divine spine rig resembles a qarternion spine setup the best and could probably be utilised in the arm setup to achieve a nice twisting action that avoids candy wrapping .

Divine Diagram

I concocted this beautiful illustration to represent what's going on in the mongrel spine. The top Fk chain (the daddy chain) is controlled by the animator. This chain is skinned to the ik splines cv curve and controls its movement (the spline will create the interpolation down the chain). The spline chain is connected to a duplicate chain (little brother) which has SC IK handles connecting them. Each little brother joint has a locator which is connected to the ik's via a pole vector. The spine can be twisted at these points down the chain giving more articulation than if you used the spline ik's twist/advanced twist controls.