OK, my character doesn’t have IK (Mancandy - it doesn’t work in the current versions) so I want to manually constrain the hand to a body (a chair) then I want to unconstrain it at some point during the animation - How do I do it?
I tried adding an empty then a transform constrain to the handbone to the empty but moving the empty doesn’t affect the hand… My aim is to be able to lock the hands down whilst I am moving the characters arms and body.
Cheers
David
You have already done something similar to this,
but i think you used the wrong constraint
Its actually quite simple.
Add an empty where you want the hand to be on the chair.
Add a copy location constraint to the hand, with the empty as the target.
You can now control how much the hand should be constrained to the empty,
by manipulating the “influence” slider in the bottom.
You can click “key” (its right next to the influence slider) to add a keyframe.
Thats it!
Yeah - tried that to but it didn’t work either 
(Mancandy 2.3, Blender 2.46) Does it only work on Geometry bones? The existing bones already have a lot of constraints applied to them but no Copy.Location Constraints…
I can constraint the empty to the hand but it just won’t work the other way round!
Well, you can’t do it unless you’ve got IK working.
Thats probably the problem.
I’ve attatched a .blend, with a working setup.
Does that work?
Thisishowitsdone.blend (138 KB)
Yep - that works. Mancandy’s IK rig is not working though the FK setup allows me to grab the hand bone and move the other arm bones along with it though it is parented such that moving the torso moves the hands along with it. (Rigging is not one of my strong points)
Yep - that works. Mancandy’s IK rig is not working though the FK setup allows me to grab the hand bone and move the other arm bones along with it though it is parented such that moving the torso moves the hands along with it. (Rigging is not one of my strong points)
Sounds like your on AutoIK. Check to see if this is on. That means that while you can move a child and its parents will move, Blender still thinks of it as an FK chain, and interpolates it as so. Any Loc constraints to a child will have no effect.
But that’s besides the point, as TobiasDN points out you need true IK on. For some reason the driven keys are broken in Mancandy 2.3, but you can directly turn them on.
Click on hand.L and hand.R, turn the Copy Scale and Copy Rotation values up,
and tell the IK constraints to aim to handgoal.L/handgoal.R respectively.
Hope that helps.
OK - Well that allows me to control the scale and rotation but I still don’t have IK control over location…
Ahhhh - missed 30 seconds of the Mancandy DVD - I needed to increase the IK influence of both the forearm and bicep bones as well… IK is working now 