Creating keyframes when using constraints?

Support Basics & Interface
1

:smiley: Hi
I’m trying to animate a row of bones, I have created skeleton of armatures to form a leg and I have inserted empties and tied it all together so I grab the “Heel” empty and move it around in edit mode it behaves as I want it to.

How do I create an animation of this? How can I “save” the position of the leg when it’s not moved in posemode?

I have tried creating the leg without the empties but thought that it would be easier to use IK when it comes to animating the thing. So normally I would enter pose mode, move the stuff, create a key frame and voila a simple animation. So again; how can I create keyframes when animating using IK+emptis.

Thank you in advance!
Killgore

This is my test bone:
LegBoneTest.blend

I have used these tuts:
http://mmaigrot.free.fr/didac-blender/ikas/ikas-eng/ik-p4.html
http://members.yourlink.net/gruff/bones/index.html

2

Set a keyframe for the empty itself, not the bones in IK chain. The bones in the chain are driven by the IK solver and do not need to be keyed at all (unless of course your rotating the base of the chain, but there are better ways to go about this).

You really shouldn’t use empties as IK targets however, as that rather defeats the purpose of action blocks (grouping keyframes into container blocks). use a bone in the armature itself to serve as a target (in the constraint block type in the name of the armature and a little box will pop up that will let you place the name of the bone in there.)