Is there an option for bone pose transforms in Blender where when you rotate a parent bone, the transforms are undone on the direct child(ren)? For example, if you were to rotate the upper leg bone, the knee bone would invert the rotation you did on the leg bone so that it preserves its world orientation(or possibly also translates keep its position too).
I’m specifically not asking about bone constraints, I know it’s possible with constraints but I’m just curious if there’s some option for it for the basic transform tools.
It’s possible to rig in a way to prevent or enable an child bone from inheriting the rotations of a parent. Nathan Vegdahl shows how to do this in his tutorial Humane Rigging. It’s called a socked rig. You could adapt this to a knee very easily.
Thanks for the tip, unfortunately though that’s not quite the level of accessibility that I was looking for. I’m thinking of possibly writing the feature myself, I don’t think it should be that hard; all you do is rotate/translate the direct child(ren) by the inverse of the rotation being done on the parent. Say, if you press shift+R it enters this alternate rotation mode.
If you combine rotation and translation it’s a little more difficult but still doable in my opinion. Seems like it would be a good thing to have for general posing, I remember it being pretty convenient in whatever application I used before that had it(then again that was back before I was into 3d much at all). For example, it makes it easier to move any part of an arm while keeping the rest of it pointed in one direction, raising the leg in preparation to stomp something, probably most importantly moving any part of the upper body while keeping the head upright, etc. Actually, it seems a little odd to me that we have auto IK but not this(I assume auto IK is much more complex than this).