Joel Finney shows how he rigged a simple bending bar in his latest animation work using Maya’s joints, Spline IK, some clusters and setting the connection is Maya’s Hypershade. Check out Joel Finney’s work on his site here.

Joel Finney writes: Got some questions on how I rigged the bendy bar on my latest animation shot (which you can check out at joelfinney.com/blog/2012/02/on-time/). I go through quickly over bones, spline IK handles, clusters, and setting up connections in the hypershade. One thing I forgot to mention about the spline IK is that you can actually set it up to be a psuedo FK/IK blended system by setting up multiple clusters and parenting them under each other (not applicable to this example, but if you were setting up a spine for example). Hope it helps, enjoy!