Child of Constraint Baking or Improvements to Visual Keying
Right now it is impossible to bake from object space to another while still seeing the same animation. For instance:
Let's say I have a walk cycle. Let's also say I have an Ik hand that is parented to the master control which has zero animation since it's just the master control But now I want the Ik hand to be in Chest control context. There should be a way to bake that anim to the chest but there isn't. The Chest Control in the this example also has animation so whatever you do, the Ik hand will inherit the some of the movement from the chest which is not ideal. The Ik hand should have accounted for the negative movement in relation to the chest to the master control. Visual keying can not achieve this if you are trying to convert from one child of constraint to another. You also cannot achieve this if you are trying to convert from one parented object to another.
This is extremely simple in Maya. You constrain something in maya with a hard constraint, then change its parent, then bake it down.. When you remove the constraint the animation will appear virtually identical even though the parent context has changed.
2 Comments
in blender you can bake an action as well, but if you want to switch parents in a more complex way you just use an armature constraint, you want the parent of the IK and to be at the same same level as root and the armature contraint will change the parent of the ik hand to follow the motion of whatever you want. This lets you keep the transforms of the ik hand independent of whatever its parent is constrained too
I will have to try this. But in the end it doesn't address the issue since the armature constraint needs an armature. In practice, there should be a solution that works with anything: Meshes, empties, rigs, bones, lights etc.