Bone Settings in Blender

HooOoray! I was just watching one of AnimationMentor's Webinars awhile back and as I was watching through the whole process of setting up curves and reversals on a character, it slightly dawned on me the solution to my current character posing problem. Of which one of them were the inability to switch back and forth between IK and FK (given I have controllers as parents to my IK bones). Then I had this feeling I *must* and *should* find a way through this afterall, and so somehow I did (that must have taken me so many words to conclude my "hooray" word).

What I did was delete ALL of my controllers (Empties in this case) and deleted the IK constraints on the bones and did this nifty little trick of doing an "Auto IK" instead of doing all those tedious and restricting setups of adding constraints. So in this manner, I was able to switch back and forth from a simple IK to FK whenever I needed to in just a click of a mouse.



Another thing (yeah, prolonging does suck) I was able to discover was Blender's ability to visualize the path and the corresponding keyframes and frame numbers alongside the animation curve. This will indeed aid in the animation process, since you don't have to worry about guessing what curve have you made nor do you have to do the marking thing *on* the surface of your monitor (with special pens). I had to identify my in-betweens, set a keyframe for it, and tadaaa, I can clearly see where my bone is arcing and edit the motion as necessary without destroying or adding further in-betweens.




And lastly, which is one of the most important discoveries of my day was the Onion Skinning feature of Blender's Armature, which they call "Ghosts" inside Blender. This is a very popular technique (especially in 2d animation) of visualizing the previous movements and sets of keys you have done with reference to the current frame and state you are in. This way, you would have a good trace of what has transpired within that span of time (or frames) and pinpoint somehow which went wrong or which ones needed correction before proceeding further.



So that's it. I hope you learned something from my endless rambling as much as I did. ^_^

See ya!