animation and constraints - what should I do here?

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

I’ve been reading on the subject, but I’ve come across a problem.

I’m creating models for a game, so I need to delete excess null and IK bones before exporting. I followed a tutorial for using constraints to animate a model, but after i had gone through the motions and set the keys, i deleted the the constraints and extra bones i used for animating and all my animations disappeared. I thought that once i set the keys, the pose would stay in place when i removed the constraints.

So i guess what I’m saying is that i’m looking for a way to create on-the-fly constraints and remove them after i’ve set the pose for a certain frame. Is there any way to do that?

#2

after you bake the animation the constraints and extra bones can be removed

before that if you remove the extra bones you have completely lost the specification of the pose [in the case of an ik constraint, removing the null bone makes the chain become the default pose…]

#3

what exporter do you use? probably it could be easily modified to ignore bones whose name starts with “IK” or something like that. i think every game format exporter should provide such options by default. :slight_smile:

#4

I’m using a directx exporter. That method works though. I have to pose, bake, delete the object and constraints i created, copy the pose from the baked action to the original action, then remove the action.bake. thanks :smiley: