I am attempting to animate a pushup:
But when I rotate the master ankle joint to lower the body, the feet and hands move out of position.
How do I lock these meshes and their bones so they do not move when the rest of the rig does?
Not sure what the master ankle joint is, but to animate a pushup I’d use the waist controller, the one that controls the entire upper body. The arms should be set to IK (I imagine there’s a switch somewhere) to stick to the ground.
This is a rough version of the animation:
I tried to move any other bones, but so far, I haven’t been able to move the entire body in a straight line.
When the animation is more polished, I want her hands to be stationary, since Caesar will be bending her arms to lower herself.
What is the master ankle joint ? can you tell me where it is in the hierarchy ? from the capture it looks like this is one of the root bones, ie somewhere at the top of the hierarchy, encompassing the hands. I guess it’s ok to do the pushups from this “ankle” controller, but you have to make sure your IK hands are not children of it, otherwise you won’t be able to stick them to the ground (well, you could with constraints targeting external objects, but that complexifies things).
This is what I called the master ankle joint, really, it’s the one that determines Caesar’s vertical (or in this case, horizontal) standing position:
I don’t think I’ll use this pivot point in the finished animation, I’m just using that bone for proof of concept, to see Caesar descend quickly/simply.
I tried using IK on the hands, did not achieve the desired result:
On using IK:
Are you sure whatever IK controller is on the hands doesn’t have a parent loop going on? If you put it directly on the hands (assuming they’re parented to the forearms), then it’s going to cause issues.
What’s the length of the IK chain? It should be just enough to control the arms (usually Two IME). If it goes beyond that, then you have IK affecting too much, up to the entire body if there’s no limit set, and that can cause its own set of problems.