I am using armatures and bones to animate my model, and was wondering if there was a way to lock the position of a bone? For instance if the hand grabs a rail and pulls, the hand should not move, but there is movement in the arm. How do I do this?
TIA!
You are talking of Inverse Kinematik (IK) make a search here with that keywords.
Look in the List of Tuts above
Go to the Blender Char Forum/Website
Stefano
Also, if you want to have the hand free to move around at one point, then locked to a location later, you’ll have to learn about constraint ipos. What you do is to assign your IK actuator bone a copy location constraint for the point you want it to lock to. Then, for most of your anim, you set that constraint’s ipo to 0, meaning that it is not affected by it. When your character locks his hand into position, you key it to 1 at that frame. No matter where you move the main rig, the hand (or whatever IK actuator you’ve chosen) will stay put. Cool!