I made a small add-on script that lets you easily set transform pivot & space to active selected object in ONE step instead of several.
You can use this to pivot from any part of a rig or any selected object. It uses the 3D Cursor, but when you Set Pivot it snaps and aligns the cursor to the local space of the active object AND sets the Transform Orientation (space) and Pivot Point to Cursor in one go, so you can then rotate (or scale) from that point, and when you click Free Pivot it restores your previous settings.
Turning this into a single click (or hotkey) makes it suitable for animation.
This script was inspired by the AnimX 2021 “We don’t need no interpolation” talk and the Ephemeral rig by Raf Anzovin. It’s an attempt to replicate some of that free-form control in Blender.
Made an update to this add-on with some minor improvements.
It now remembers and restores the 3D cursor position on reset and also lets you pivot from vertices, edges, or faces in Edit Mode, not just bones and whole objects.
Note one limitation of this script is with single FK controls it does not override bone connections so if you try to use it on an FK bone it will be limited to rotating from its parent bone unless you select the entire hierarchy. Works best with IK controls.
Someone elsewhere pointed out this seems a lot like just using Active Element as a pivot, so what is the difference? The main one is that this uses the 3D cursor aligned to the local space of your active selection. You can get similar functionality by manually setting pivot to Active Element and transformation orientation space to Normal. However, one advantage of the 3D cursor approach is the visual feedback of the cursor AND for IK controls you don’t have to keep the pivot point selected while rotating around it.
You could create an alternate version of this script that uses Active Element instead. Either way, the advantage of the add-on is that it turns what would normally be several steps (changing transform orientation and pivot manually, plus aligning the cursor) into ONE step: one click or hotkey.
