one bone to control them all (vid)

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi!

Is there an easy way to make 1 bone control an animation of several bones at the same time?

Here’s a video of what I’ve got so far. You can see the front gear was easy because there was only one bone needed to animate. I used shift+ctr+c and added the action constraint to power the animation made in the action editor in the dope sheet. I butchered it at first but managed to get it working in the end.

The rear gear is causing me a headache. I’ve made the animation in the action editor and saved it, but to add the action constraint to every single bone in the animation is going to be tedious as hell, is there an easier way to do what i’m trying?

Is it as simple as just using the animation in the NLA?

2

Use the copy attributes addon to copy constraints to selected bones. (Set up the action constraint on a single bone, then copy the configured constraint to all others keyed in the action.)

I use it in this tutorial to create a window control using action constraints (roughly the four minute mark.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luaxyQRyDSU&t=5s

Good luck!

3

Thanks Dan! works like a charm!