Hi I coming from Maya, and I am animating in Blender, but how do you fix sliding feet in Blender ( I dont want to eyeball it , as its not accurate ) In Maya I would constrain for those frames, then keyframe it and then delete the constraint. Its very useful for tricky moves like turns ect. I did search some tutorials in Blender but it was for mo cap and a rig without ctrls .
Anyone know of a good tutorial for properly rigged character. ?
Or maybe Blender animators use some kind of add on ?
You can do a similar trick in Blender by snapping the 3d cursor into a bone that you want to remain stationary, then add an empty, then add copy location and copy rotation constraints to the bone and set the empty as target. You can keyframe the visibility for the constraints as wanted. You can also change the mix type to offset legacy if you want it to not affect the original rotation at the beginning. Then you can either add a visual location and rotation keyframes to the part where needed frame by frame, or go to nla editor and in pose mode from strip menu select bake action, choose only selected bones, visual keying, and overwrite current action, then set the frame range to the part you want to bake, and bake. After that you can delete the constraints. 
So you have to use the bone and not the controller ( In Maya you we use the controller, as an example foot controller is constrained ) So in blender you mean you ignore the controller ? But I may need to edit keys or make adjustments. Im confused why they use bones? But I suppose you must be able to add keyframes on the controller once the bone is locked down, then delete the constraint.
I’m not familiar with Maya, but as far as I understand, Blender has a bit different logic. In Blender rigs controllers are bones too, (I’m not sure is this different in Maya?). They are usually just not deforming bones. And they usually have a custom shape added so that you can tell the difference. So if you have an IK controller bone for a foot, hand etc, you will constrain that if you want it to stay stationary. In Blender, you can add bone constraints into bones, and the target can be another bone or an object. And empties are only objects in Blender. So you must add an empty in object mode, and then constraint the bone into it, so it will copy the location and rotation of the empty object. After that, if you want to animate the constrained bone with the constraints on you can go to object mode and just animate the object that the bone is constrained to. But when you finally want to bake the movement into the rig action itself, then you must bake it into the bone that is constrained. And it must be done with visual keying.
Ok Thank you soo much for your help!, I will give this a go and see how I get on on.
Hi again…
So in maya, they use objects as controllers from what I have seen. We don’t do that in blender, we use an armature’s bones for everything. Some bones deform the mesh, other bones are the controllers to the deformer bones. Bones can have custom shapes (mesh objects) assigned to them, so they appear as a cube or a circle or a straight line. And there are other bones that we won’t talk about now.
Key frames are stored in actions for the object. If the object is an armature, then that armature’s action will have channels for each bone that is key framed. You can use objects (cube, empty) as controllers, but as you insert key frames for them, each object will have it’s own action. 2 cubes as hand controls, 2 cubes as foot controls, and you have 4 actions to deal with. Using all bones, you’d have 1 action with 4 channels. Easier to deal with in the other editors, like the F-Curve editor (aka the spaghetti editor).
As to how to stop sliding feet when walking, you do that using IK for the legs/feet. Pose an IK foot controller, then grab the hip controller and move it around, the foot will stay in place.
Randy
I use rigify, with the feet in IK mode. No slipping by default.
I think the OP meant some more tricky movements where normal IK controls are not enough, like movements that require spinning the root bone etc, but one foot still needs to remain on the ground for a moment after the root bone motion has already begun. That’s why I instructed constraining the control bones to empties for those moments and then doing visual keying for them.
Im doing a character doing a somersault, I have parented an empty to the root, so I can use that to somersault him (with no fidely IK To FK switching ) However as the root is moving I need to constrain the foot for a few frames , in maya I would constrain the foot ctrler to an empty ( Maya its locator ) just for thoses frames and then delete the constraint. I tried this method of bone to the empty , but it doesnt work ? Am I missing something?
Constraining is a big part of animation, example character hanging on to a helicopter or swapping guns ect.
Why is something that should be very simple, so so difficult in Blender?
Help!
You must keyframe the visibility of the foot controller bone constraint, it’s the eye shaped icon. Not delete anything. And with copy location constraint you probably shouldn’t check the offset option, it might behave strangely, it’s best to just copy the world location directly to the world location of the bone. But what do you mean by parenting an empty to the root? Shouldn’t it be parenting the root to the empty, so the root will move with it? In blender, it would be better to just juplicate the root bone in the armature and parent the original root bone to the new root bone, then use the new root bone for the spinning in x axis.
It’s either just unfamiliarity due to Blender working in a different logic, or the reason why Maya is the industry standard for animating and Blender not that much. 
It’s not at all difficult.
Just slightly different approach in Blender, perhaps. Though I used Maya and never considered it that different really.
For Rigify, you can keyframe the parent of IK controllers.
If set to None, you’d get something like this.
You can also add a constraint.
The infuence of this constraint can be keyframed.
And you can use most other controllers in the rig (parent hand to head ) some no because of cyclic conflicts) or an object, (Empty) Rig/Bone outside of you rig.
Coming from another animation program you can figure out the rest.
Hi the root bone with IK should always stay on the floor level. if you want to animate the torso arms and feet you need to add another bone in the centre pivot point and parent the controls to that bone. or use the curser as pivot.
Here is are two rough examples;
Rigify makes that step unnecessary because you can parent the hands and feet to the Torso. But if you switch to FK for those it won’t matter.
Rigify torso bone is like a second root in the rig.
There is also a chest and hip bone that both animate independently of the torso.
Torso can be used to position the hips but also as a center of gravity for flip, curl and summersault animations if you set your parenting for that or use FK on the limbs.
Probably in reality, foot IK set to none in the case of this might best be reserved to adding a parent constraint to the foot. It will keyframe on and off more predictably from my experience.
It could be an Empty or another external rig/bone.
Yes i know, but @Matthew_Drozario didn’t want to use the rigify switches and parenting he wanted a one control for the other controllers in IK.
This?
No. That is incredibly simple to do using the torso.
And this:
(with no fidely IK To FK switching )
In this case, my use of the root would be to either a) not use it at all or b) use it only to transform the character, say over large distances through the air until it lands. Or only if I had a lot of rotations on the Torso I wanted tio keep separate from movement. All other translation of the character I would use the Torso. In either cause, simply stop moving the root on the frames you want to plant the feet. Or if the character is not traveling far don’t animate it at all. Use it as a rest point to plant any limb at any time anyplace you need it.
I strongly suggest not animating yourself out into the weeds on this one. You have not presented an animation sceenario that requries extra constraints other than with Rigify here.
In this case it is incredibly simple. And learning the IK/FK Switching as well as keyframing constraints are equally challenging at first go. I am sure you must remember your first days with Maya?
Just because that became easy over time, don’t expect Blender to be instantly easy.
It’s the former. This has nothing to do with industry standard for Maya. I have used Maya extensively for animation for a number of years.
But that said, I would not call it a different logic. Just different tools to do the same thing.
Both Blender and Maya have IK/FK switching, contstraints. Both can use objects or bones as controllers etc.
In my experience rigging and animating in Blender is - as of recent releases - far easier and straightforward than Maya, and was a large reason why I just switched back to Blender.
Having learned several different software packages over the years LightWave, Blender, Softimage, MotionBuilder, Maya etc. I think I can speak objectively and not as a “fanboy”.
My first exploration in a new software is not to dive in with a project and see what I find. It is to go over the toolset carefully first to see how to do the things I already know how to do using the tools in software X. Then, move forward with that knowledge.
The problem comes when, as in this example here -as far as I can see, you dive in, get stuck in the middle of something and already made a bunch of bad choices before stepping back and learning first how to do it in this software.
I think most animators would find Blender to be pleasantly easier to do in Blender by comparision if you first learn how it works.
Example here is perfect for that. It is far more complex and even unecissary to create another object or bone to keep feet from sliding in these tumbling flighting or action animations. This feature is already built into Rigify.
It’s not difficult, it’s new. No worries, it’ll make sense. You can still constrain bones to empties with a copy transforms constraint set to world space.
The constraint system is set to change at some point during the animation overhaul (happening now), but it hasn’t been mentioned in a while. Hopefully, it should be made into a more modular system that lets users constrain in exactly their own terms instead of relying on these -sometimes inflexible- building blocks.
However, for the case presented here, as outlined by others, you should have all you need to carry out the action
Yep I recently started learning Unreal Engine and first I thought about learning how to animate inside it, because UE does not work that well together with Blender than they say it works with Maya. But soon I realized UE has so many so annoying features that they soon became dealbreakers for me. For example having to use gizmos for transforming (I hate gizmos, with my working style they always get on my way and I click them accidentally when trying to select things etc, and you even have to look at them from a certain direction to be able to reach the right axis or in between controller). Even though you can transform in UE without gizmos by holding ctrl and then having left click for x, right click for y and both for z, the z axis is not reliable in every workspace. And the viewport navigating in UE is simply painful, because not all the camera moving features work in every workspace. So I finally ended up staying in Blender for animations and making a control rig for the UE default skeleton in there (it was painful because I designed it myself around the rig I originally planned to use for UE). By baking animations into the default UE rig in Blender I managed to make them compatible with the UE default mannequin so I can still use animations from marketplace when needed etc. But anyway, I love so many features in Blender that make animating very fast and easy, at least for me. Like the ability to have no gizmos visible, not needing to switch between move rotate scale but getting each by just pressing a single button, the ability to instantly switch from global to local with just double clicking the hotkey, having the alt+midmouse to focus on anything. And having the slow down option by holding shift. And the super easy viewpoint switching to front, back, side, and automatic switching between orthographic and perspective when moving camera from them etc etc. Even though I haven’t used Maya myself, I have watched tutorials for animating in it. I was kinda surprised how slowly the animating process proceeded, because of the switching between transform modes, choosing the right bone, choosing the right axis from the gizmo, then moving the gizmo with mouse… And the exactly same thing with UE animating tutorials. They didn’t seem that smooth to me coming from Blender. Or maybe it’s just some subconsious bias from me.
In Blender you’d usually switch the foot control to IK, lock the foot in place with a clean key pose, and then blend IK/FK to avoid sliding—basically the same idea as constraining in Maya, just done through the rig’s controls. Most rigging tutorials for “IK foot pinning” cover this well. You might need to pass your animation files around a simple sharing’ platform would make it easy across devices.
