Attach it to your objects or bones, point it at another object - say like an Empty that’s at the level of the top of your stage - and the constrained object/bone won’t go below the target.
Your feet will no longer sink through the floor.
I’m working on making a CVS patch and having someone take a look at it.
Anyone who wants to try it out now can get my home-rolled windows binary from:
Plop it in your Blender directory with your main Blender.exe file and run it. The new constraint type is called “Floor”. Make yourself an Empty, attach the Floor constraint to your desired object, and point it to the empty. Turn off the X and Y buttons in the constraint buttons, so you only are using the Floor of the Z-value of the empty.
does it has some relation with the pinning bone feature you mention in Blender org animation section?
I remember when threads about it started, you mentioned the floor constrain(as a part of solving the sliding feet problem, addon to pinning bones), extremely good for Blender animation to have a first flavour of it… !
Just curios about one thing: couldn’t be the “pinning bone” feature a “lock” constrain? I mean, a constrain that you apply to a bone with an option for be locked in position from frame1 to frame21, from frame41 to frame61, and so on.
Mmm… maybe a little messy and complicated anyway, better the regular pinning.
yup, actually wouldn’t be so useful if you can’t deactivate it and activate it all the time…
probably he is not doing it as a constrain?
In character studio, you unpin the bone with just a click, which is the fastest way. I pin a foot only for the moments I need…I don’t even care on frame number, just toggle it as I go needing.But i know this is asking too much, probably.
BTW, tested that feature and worked really nice! Now we have “sliding key” that character studio has… Congratulations. an avi capture of my test…
There is two kinds of pinning that I’m working on/thinking about. One is a bone pinning feature that is implemented as part of NLA. You can see images and sample animations, as well as a more comprehensive description, in this thread on .org:
Two is a World Pin key. I’m not quite sure how to accomplish this, but when this key is “on”, meaning it’s IPO is 1 or greater, it stays put in world space at the same initial location of the activation of the key.
If I can get the world pinning to work, maybe I’ll put it into a new constraint that stops a foot dead when it hits a floor and won’t let it slide.
Extrudeface - I check my pm’s a couple times a day, and didn’t see anything. Try sending it again. Weird.
I’m working on the ability to pin bones between NLA strips so, for example you’d indicate that the bone foot.left was pinned in an NLA strip, and it would move the whole armature so that at the beginning of the strip, that bone is in the same place in world space as it was before the strip. No sliding or gliding between strips. It’s necessary for really freeform animation between strips in an NLA system like Blender has.
IMHO, this constraint is too limited. Maybe it should be something like CannotIntersect. But, has not this objective not already been handled well enough by Python?
Yes, you can do this in Python, and script-link it to your object. The problem is speed. Let’s say you have 2000 objects, each with two feet, and each foot with two points of floor contact. That’s 8000 script links. Ever tried it? Extremely sloooooooow.
Also, I’m on a sort of mission to bring Blender’s native character animation tools up to par with some of the pro apps. That’s all.
i’m not very updated about your constrain(i’m talking about a bone that allow my character to walk without any ice effect :)), it has been already included in the official build?
if not, can you give some news?
tnx, and sorry if you have already provided this kind of info somewhere else.
No news, really. I don’t have cvs commit priveleges (with good reason), so I submitted my patch for this quite a while ago. What became of it, I’m not really sure. I’ve been busy working on pinBone, and haven’t given this a thought in months.
Also, this constraint does not prevent ice skating. That would be something else entirely. I’ve thought about that problem, and I’m not even sure how to tackle it with the way that Blender goes about things.
Congratulations. 
(joke)
