Hello all!
I’m currently working on a rig that I have. The model is pretty much all rigged up, and I gave it an action, simply because I know it will be occurring a lot (it’s a mechanical rig, and the action is opening up the top, which is relatively involved). I would like to control this action with another bone in the rig.
Of the 12 bones involved in the action, 4 are already constrained with an IK constraint. After setting up an action constraint on one of my otherwise unconstrained bones, I've tried using "Copy Constraints to Selected Bones" to apply it to the 11 other bones involved in the action. However, this deletes the IK constraint already on some of the bones. Most of the bones in my rig are constrained in some way, and I would like to set up action constraints on a lot of them, but I don't want to redo all of my work constraining them in the first place! Is there some way to copy new constraints over to bones without deleting the existing constraints, or to apply a constraint to multiple bones at once? Or, is there some other technique that I could be using for this situation?
Just checking out advice I had some doubts about what I said: stand by!
From the wiki:
Unfortunately, using a Pose action on a whole armature object (to affect all the keyed bones in the action at once) won’t work… Note also that you can use the pose library feature to create/edit a Pose action datablock…
You’re right, I was trying to map it onto each bone! Should I map it onto the armature? I tried doing that in object mode, but the armature didn’t change poses as I moved the target. Do you know what I’m doing wrong?
Hi Sunboy I guess although this really seems that it should be possible it is, weirdly not implemented. i.e. you may not select an armature as the owner of a pose action, you have to select the bones and give each one the constraint. Additionally, there is also no way to copy or paste constraints. If you copy to selected all the selected’s constraints are replaced. So if your action constraint affects a hundred bones, then you are going to have to set up 100 individual constraints. One by one. This really should not be the case! At the very least there should be an option to add constraints to more than one bone at a time…
…Erg. I assume that there is a way to get a feature like that implemented, correct? Perhaps even I could write a script for it? It would take significantly more time than simply doing it by hand, but I imagine that I’m going to be doing this a lot! In fact…I would imagine that MANY people would be doing this a lot, wouldn’t they? Curious then that there isn’t a better way… Anyway, thank you for your help.
If you write a script to copy or add a constraint to several objects without deleting the ones already in place I am sure many people would find it useful! I can’t see why this was written like this anyway…
I got it, without having to code anything! Just for future reference, anyway: The Ctrl + C menu (Copy Attributes Menu,which I recently learned is a built-in add-on that you need to activate) from pose-mode allows you to copy over constraints to other bones WITHOUT overwriting the target bones’ existing constraints. Everyone kept mentioning the Ctrl + C menu, but NO ONE mentioned that you needed to activate it…
