Freeze transformations, and also constraining.

I’ve recently started using Blender, I’ve been using Maya for the last 10 years or so, but now I use Blender. It’s pretty good overall. I’ve been learning up how to rig. For the most part it’s pretty good. I’ve adapted a lot of my rigging techniques from Maya pretty well, and everything’s running basically okay. However at this point I’ve hit a snag.

First of all, Maya has this command called freeze transformations. What it does is set all the rotation location and scale values on an object to zero but leaves it where it is. Basically sets wherever it’s set in world space to now be it’s default zero. I’ve been searching around and I can’t find any way to do this in Blender. Hitting clear location just sends the object to the origin in the scene. Same with hitting apply location. Just knocks it back to the origin. I thought it might be because the pivot point was at the origin, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. So there’s that. Right now I’m dealing with a rig that I can’t zero out, and it’s really annoying.

Second, I’m having some difficulty with some of the constraints. Namely copy rotation. Basically when I set copy rotation for the bone that’s controlling the foot roll to attach it to a controller, the skeleton just vomits and breaks. It just will not co operate. I’ve tried monkeying around with the offsets and the like but again, that doesn’t seem to work. Is there any alternative to using copy rotation?

Thanks a lot.

There’s a command to set pose as rest position, just hit spacebar and type a few words to find it.

If you are having problems with Copy Rot constraint, check you are using Pose space if that is what you need. Or use Drivers instead, they are much more versatile and reliable.

Cheers, Clock

Thanks a lot, I didn’t know about pose as rest space that’s useful to know.

I discovered one of my issues was I was trying to use apply location on empties. It seems to work better on actual objects like Nurbs curves and polygon objects. So I switched to Nurbs curves and parented them to an empty, and that worked properly. I discovered applying location will still knock the object back to origin, but if it’s parented to an empty it will put it to the center of the empty. SO that’s all working now.

Thanks for the help!