Hi, I come from Maya, I am on Blender 2.79 for limited hardware reasons.
How can I make a sort of Maya’s Driven key with an empty’s location controlling bones animation interpolation? I thought about using a driver but I don’t know how to connect it to some bones keyframes.
Thanks for your help
Hello and welcome to the forum!
I don’t know maya at all. Are you really trying to change the bone’s animation interpolation?
If so, you’ll have to do that in either the Dopesheet or Graph editors. With the mouse in the Dopesheet or Graph editor, T-key brings up the menu to change interpolation.
If this isn’t what you are looking for, please provide more details…
Randy
Hi Randy, thanks for your reply. Thanks for the T-key shortcut, I didn’t know it. But it’s not what I am looking for. I am working on a wing rig. So I created some bones and what I thought about was this:
have a keypose with the wing opened and a keypose with the wing closed. Then the ultimate goal would be to have a slider (I thought using the translate of an empty) that would control the opening of the rig. So the animator could work with this and keyframe it on the timeline of his own animation.
Thanks again for helping
There is Action in the Bone Constraints - which is for things like move one bone to drive the 3 bones controlling a wings open/shut.
You need to be in pose mode to add bone constraints…
Clearly I was mis-understanding you…
This is one method and it works, but I’ve always avoided the Action constraint. If the character is linked/appended into another file, the action that the constraint uses has to be linked/appended as well, or it won’t work. Not a big deal if you are the only one using the character.
You could also use drivers on the rotation of the bones. Move the controller and the bones would rotate to fold/unfold the wing. Of course this takes away from the ability to further pose the bones.
One thing to get away from is the maya way of using objects to control armatures, use all bones instead. This keeps all the keys in 1 action. If you used empties instead, each empty would have it’s own action as well. A bunch of empties as switches/controllers = a bunch of actions for just 1 rig.
Randy
Hello,
Matakani, thanks your idea helped a lot, I could do the thing. Here’s the documentation I used :
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/rigging/constraints/relationship/action.html
Randy, for now I’ll be the only one to use the rig, it’s everything in one file. And not even an entire character, basically I’ve got the wing and that’s all.
In your previous message, do you recommend, if I get it well, to use only bones, and not objects like nurbs curves to keyframe and control an armature like I would do in Maya?
Again, thanks a lot everyone
Here’s also a youtube video that inspired me:
2.79 is going to give you challenges, as obviously later advancements have made many things far easier.
If you can manage to jump to 2.93, this addon would make you happy.
Yes. Let’s say you have a biped and your using 5 objects (nurbs, empties, whatever) as controllers, 2 IK feet, 2 IK hands, 1 hip controller. Create a walk cycle and you set keys on 5 objects. Actions are stored on the objects, so you would have 5 different actions, one for each object. Now if you wanted a run cycle, you’d need to create 5 new actions, one for each object. Switch back to walk cycle, have to change the actions on those 5 objects.
If your controllers are all bones, you’d create 1 action on the armature that has 5 channels. Walk cycle would be 1 action on the armature. To add a run cycle you’d create 1 new action on the armature and key those 5 channels. Switch back to walk cycle and you only have to change 1 action on 1 object, the armature.
Hope that makes sense,
Randy
Thanks Randy, that’s very interesting,
Have a nice day
Thanks a lot Thorn, right now I can’t upgrade unfortunately, but I’ll keep that info,
have a good day,
best