I am animating a character and I have posed them out the way I want. I have a pose where the characters IK hand is resting on their hip. I realized after that I want the hand to follow the hip, however after parenting the hand to the hip the hand’s position changed and kept the same transform values. Is there a way to get the hand to its original position? In maya with a similar situation I would just create an empty, allign it to the original position of the hand and then allign the hand back to the empty when I need to. Doing that in blender though has been challenging.
The Maya solution is similar to what you need to do in Blender…
Create an Empty
Select Armature, go into Edit Mode and select the Hip Bone.
Go into Object Mode. Select the Empty, select the Armature and ctrl-p → bone
Select Armature, go into Pose Mode, select the hand and in the Bone Constraints tab add a Inverse Kinematic constraint with 3 Chain Length. Select the Empty as target.
The hand should be following the empty and the empty should be part of the hip:
So I followed your guide and was able to get the empty to follow the hip. But I was not able to get the hand ik to follow the empty. The empty was not selectable in pose mode. Any ideas why? Also when i added the IK constraint, the whole rig started rotating on its own until i set the iterations as 0
I just want to offer my own method for handling this-- other answers here are reasonable as well.
You already have an IK arm, right? Create an empty. Parent it to the hip. Give the IK target a copy transforms constraint targeting the empty. Adjust the empty to pose the hand appropriately. To turn it on or off, keyframe the influence of the copy transforms constraint.
There are reasons I prefer this method. It lets you use existing IK structures. It doesn’t use a child of, so interpolation through partial influence is reasonable, and you can apply a visual transform to do your own control of interpolation if you want.