Hello! I’m using a “Track to” constraint, to make the eyes of a character follow a set of empties… My question is, if i start moving the empties, (which are parented to the main armature) how can i reset the empties to the original location which makes the eyes look at the front?
Why not track bones instead of empties? Then you could just clear transformations on the bones and they’ll return to the rest pose. With empties, I don’t think there is a way to do that.
I concur. It’s also generally a good idea to run all the character’s animation from a single armature object, because then it’s possible to change the action of the character by changing the Action on the armature. If there are many different objects that act as controls for the animation, it’s more difficult to coordinate anything, as I learned the hard way when I tried to make a character rig with empties as the IK targets.
Oh! And another thing: select the empty on the rig you currently have and clear its location (alt+g). Do the eyes immediately follow it, or are they still pointing to where it was before? If they don’t (I expect they won’t,) that’s because Blender sees a circular dependency and won’t update the bones’ rotations automatically. That circular dependency is: the empty depends on (is a child of) the armature, and the armature depends on (has bones constrained to) the empty. We can see why this shouldn’t happen (the rotation of the bones within the armature will not affect the empty, which is a child of the armature object,) but Blender’s dependency graph can’t deal with this now. If you use bones within the same armature, (so long as the eye targets aren’t children of the eye bones) this lag won’t happen.
didn’t know you could do it with bones, thanks!
@Solvent : So, if i’ve understand it correctly :
1.- I can keep the eye empties, (i was using 1 empty per eye, and then 1 bigger empty to move those 2) but parenting those to a bone instead.
2.- The eyes are childs of the head bone, so it would be OK as long as they ain’t parented to the same bone the empties are…
Here’s an example of how to do it with bones. It allows a lot easier control than empties, I think. The way I’ve done it here also allows you to control each eye individually or both at once. EyeExample.blend (1.16 MB)
