Creating a "slinky" with a fully keyable rig

[Atte J.]

You remember slinky, the coil toy?

That's what my client wants me to create in AE, in 2d obviously but it needs to be fully animatable and it won't be "walking" down the stairs.

I have 2 theories. The first is just creating a hi-res slinky graphic in Photosop or Illustrator and using the Puppet tool to rig it with control points at each end and one in the middle. Might work, right? It's just that the coils' thickness would stretch and squeeze and they would not rotate to touch each other when compressed. The second idea is to have a path rigged with Create Nulls from Paths. That would make the animation really easy but then there is the creation of the coil pattern, particularly in a way that actually works like the slinky.

Any ideas? Is there some weird way to do this with a stroke? No? How about a script/plugin? Rigging a few coils would be ok but 100? 200?

[Mylenium]

Create a single loop of the coil in whatever perspective is needed in a pre-comp, repeat it with Motion Tile and animate it with CC Bend It, Bezier Warp etc. . I think you're overthinking it and making the task more daunting than it actually is.

Mylenium

[Atte J.]

Well... sure, but I need to animate it as if it was a character. Meaning, both ends and the middle need to be animated with separate position and rotation keyframes. Maybe i wasn't clear with what I need initially.

[Mylenium]

Your can do that with a setup as described and multiple bend effects.

Mylenium

[Atte J.]

I don't really see how that could be done... 

[Mylenium]

See attached sample for basic concepts. You just need to refine them liek linking stuff with expressions to keep distances etc..

Mylenium

[Atte J.]

I'm sorry but that won't do it. Like I said the slinky has to be animatable like a character. In the attached file I have the best solution so far (without a rig for every coil loop) but since Puppet tool's "skinning" is far from perfect the coils gets crumbled and warped pretty quickly. But you can see what kind of a rig that I need.