I’m making some models and animations for a game I’m making, and some of them involve guns. The problem I’m having is hard to explain, I’ll do my best.
For most of these animations, I’m using a “Child Of” constraint for a bone on the gun to attach it to the hand, as you may have guessed, the influence is supposed to start at 0, and end on 1. However, Blender isn’t letting me do this, as if I set the value at one end, it sets the other value to that as well. For example, if I set the last keyframe to 1, it sets the first frame to 1 as well.
I’m having another problem, I’m doing an animation with a shotgun that involves a bone on the gun using a “Child Of” Constraint to attach it to the hand, and another bone using IK for the “cocking” part of the gun, so it goes back whenever the characters moves the hand back. In the pick-up/pull out animation, both are starting at 0 and ending in 1.
However, it only seems to animate one at a time, whenever you’re looking at the influence, when I thought I had the “Child Of” bone sorted, and worked on the IK bone, it didn’t animate the “Child Of” constraint at all when testing, but it did when I clicked on it to check the influence.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I recorded the problem, you can see the video here.
Did you actually set a keyframe for the Influence at these two different frames? Merely sliding the slider does not necessarily set a key. After setting the slider to the value you want, hover the pointer over the slide and hit the I-KEY/ The slider should turn yellow, indicating that frame has a key on it. On other frames, the slider will be green, indicating that it has been keyed at least once. If the slider is white, no keys are set. If you move to another frame, change the value and set a key again (slider again turns yellow), the slider value will change gradually between the two keys based on the shape of the F-curve the keyframes have generated (see the F-Curve Editor). You will also find keys entered in the DopeSheet/Action Editor for that object.
The second part of the problems sounds too complex to troubleshoot from a description alone. Can you post the .blend file?
Taking a look at your .blend, I see a large number of animation channels with red underlines – this means they are having problems and are disabled. Under the Channel menu item in either the Action Editor or the Graph Editor, there is an option “Revive Disabled F-Curves.” Choosing this will clear the red-line status of most of the channels, but not all. The red-line returns after a time as well, indicating that the problem that causes the disabling to be persistent. I can’t tell exactly what that problem is but it seems to be related to your two proxies for the Dart Gun and Shotgun. My impression is that because these are proxies, the bones the constraints refer to do not exist and thus the anim channels referring to those bones are invalid. I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish with the proxies, but all the red-line channels seem to be associated with them.
Oh, the guns are linked from seperate .blends, that was so that if I ever decided to modify one of the guns, the guns in the main .blend are changed as well, I forgot all about them when I uploaded that .blend, sorry about that…
How would I go about sending the linked .blends? Do I just simply pack all the files into a zip archive? Something tells me that it isn’t as simple as that, because it seems to be able to load the linked models in the main .blend on my PC without any problems, no matter where I saved/loaded it, I’m assuming that means that it remembers the exact location of the linked .blends?
Well anyway, I put both the stipped down .blend and the linked shotgun file in a zip and uploaded that, the download link has been updated, not sure what good it’ll do, though…
I think I’m getting somewhere now, I think the problem lies in the shotgun, because the dart gun, my other linked object, has no problems at all with constraints. I decided to try and delete the Shotgun and linking it again, but I found out that I can’t delete the shotgun, the option didn’t appeared, however, the delete option appeared for the dart gun. I must’ve done something wrong when I went to link the Shotgun. Luckily, I make frequent backups of my files, so I can just retrieve an older version of the .blend.
Do you think that might have something to do with it? What’s causing it?
EDIT: Nope, that wasn’t it, I just opened an older version of my .blend, and re-linked the model properly and made a test animation, the problem persists.
Okay, I’ve finally recreated the problem with an appended gun instead of a linked one, I had a lot of trouble recreating the problem, because for a bit, the constraints did their job, they broke again. The constraints don’t work when you want it to, but it works when you don’t want them to.
Anyway, I’ve made a rough animation that demonstrates the problem, I’ve uploaded the .blend here, hopefully now, you can have a proper look.