Is it possible to use armature animation in groups? I know how to use poses in blender, but say you have an arm and a hand; is it possible to set a pose for the hand and finger armatures that follows the arm movement. Like say I wanted a closed fist pose for the hand and then I wanted to set different arm poses (up in the air, down by side, etc.). Is this possible? Any help is greatly appreciated.
I’m not sure what you mean by “armature animation in groups” … I mean in your example if you make a fist with the hand then go on to pose the arm it is attached to you won’t need to do anything to the fist pose to animate the arm … I mean nothing will happen to the hand unless you set new keys for them …
Okay, I’ll try to make more sense. I’ll use what I am trying to do as an example. If I save two poses for the hand - closed fist and open fist - and two poses for the arm - up and down. What I want to do is use the up pose for the arm and the closed fist for the hand. After this, I want to switch to the open fist while still in the arm up pose. After this, I would like the arm to move downward. Once in the arm down position I would like to switch back to the closed fist pose. What I meant by “armature animation in groups” is setting poses for armatures but only for some armatures, not the whole system. Is this possible? I hope this is clearer. If not, let me know because I really need to figure this out.
You fooled us all by calling Bones Armatures. In Blender an Armature is an Object type, the editable parts of which are Bones.
You can use an Action Constraint to open and close the fist (search for posts by Duoas and Gabio on this, I think Duoas actually posted his thread in the Tutorials forum too) where the keyframed Actions of all finger bones are linked to the Loc or Rot of a control bone (much like Drivers) and the Constraint is controlled (given a value) with an Inf(luence) IPO. Or you can just use the “FistClose” Action as seperate Strips in the NLA Editor and position and scale them wherever you want it to happen in the Timeline.
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Oh okay, sorry for the mixup. Ill try that. Thanks.