(Solved) Allow us to temporarily disable parent bone during animation
I have a rig, which contains the "weapon" of a model, which is a child of the hand. In one of the animations, I want to temporarily put the weapon on the ground for a bit, then pick it back up. But during this time period, the weapon is trying to get to the hand. I tried "freezing" its position, by adding more keyframes to its ground position, but you can see it struggling to stay still. In the animation it looks as if it has a will of its own, which is actually quite funny, but not the effect I'm looking for. So being able to disable parent during the animation, would be great! Alternatively, being able to manipulate/animate a bone via its global/world coordinates would also work for what I'm trying to do.
3 Comments
You can use a "Child of" constraint to have the same effect as you've described. It will parent the weapon to the hand. You can animate the influence to disable or enable the parenting.
This worked, thanks :) I did need to adjust the weapon's position the moment I turn on/off the Child of, but it was much better than having to animate all the in-betweens :D
No probs. Another tip for that is that you could have another extra "ground bone". The weapon would have a "Copy Transforms", targeted to this ground bone. Turning the Copy transforms ON will attach it to the ground, turning it OFF will leave it attached to the hand.
Let me know if that makes sense, with constraints you can avoid a lot of the counter animating issues.