In this tutorial, I go over how to set up the action constraints, where you can use a bone to control things like finger curl/expand, or something more advanced, like facial expressions.
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16 Responses to “Learning Action Constraints”Leave a Comment
Thanks for this great tutorial Dave
Animating comes easier and faster with this technic.
Combine with your previous tip “Combining 2 rigs” it’s even faster for a complete project.
that’s what i’m here for
Talk about awesome! =D I wish I’d known about these guys sooner xD However (surprise, surprise), I have a question! Is it possible to simply go to a designated frame from where you are, rather than specifying a starting position? =)
-Patrick
i guess i don’t understand your question :{
I’m sorry, I’ll try to be more clear. =) What I mean is that when you apply an Action Constraint you have to fill in a start and end frame. However, let’s say I have 5 frames, 1 being used for the mouth to say ‘A’, 2 being ‘E’, 3 being ‘I’, etc. Now I could go from A to E, and from E to I, but what if I wanted to go from A to I?
Or another example: Facial Expressions. Let’s say Frame 1 is happy, frame 2 is sad, 3 is angry and 4 is shy. How would I go from whichever emotion I’m currently at to sad, for example?
you’d probably just need to throw in a generic blank expression in there between each keyframe set (like the limp hand). i haven’t gotten REAL indepth with this constraint, but i would think that would be the best way to do it.
Ah ok, I see what you mean now =) Thanks!
Hmm seems i am getting some kind of crazy error message.
Seems the video has been blocked from being embedded on this page.
No problem though I will go directly to the vimeo page just thought it would be helpful information. =)
Heh Kris, Glad you are able to watch it also directly on Vimeo, it seems to be a bug going around with accounts. but I updated code to see if that changes it and will keep an eye on it.
If I understand well both (you and the tut), you have to duplicate the frame 1 “A” just before the frame 3 “I”.
But you probably should put a “neutral frame” between each of them… as it is in the tut.
Watch it again, maybe you could find your answer faster
Pretty neat stuff indeed! Thanks for this nice animation insight. A little advanced for me but I still enjoyed it much and learned a lot.
Oh, and David, you can tell the direction/axis by either the colors on the “translation widget” or by looking into the bottom left corner of 3D view where a 3 small rotating axes with descriptions are located. HTH
Thanks!
First, Thanks for all your tutorials they have rally help me to make the transition to blender and start to get up to speed.
This comment is not for this tutorial but for the walk cycle tutorial, which can not be found.
On working in NLE, in the video, you had problems with deformation of the character. Well it was because you did everything on one track.
If you use add, and add a track, then add action “standing around”. you can move it anywhere and move the “walk cycle”.
Once you have them where you want you can add them both to the same track and it will not deform.
Hope that makes sense.
Again Great tutorials. Look forward to more.
Hmmm – I think I could make an Osipa style rig like this. Very cool. The “actions” in Blender is very powerful. I think I would compare it to the Cinema 4d pose morph tag.
Could I control bone movement and the slider for a face morph shape in one control bone? Can I link multiple actions to one control bone to say, make one bone close the whole hand?
As always, great work!
David,
In the last beta version of 2.5 You can copy constraints.
You make the constraint for the first bone, then you select the next one that you want to add the same constraint, Shift + clik on the bone with the constraint already set.
Then you come down here, next to where you change modes (object-edit-etc) and click on Pose (not the pose mode but the pose next to that mode changin box). Scroll up to Constraints and click Copy Constraints to Selected.
And it’s done
I’ve enjoyed your alien tuts so far, and have been reasonably successful, but I didn’t get very far in this tutorial, because when I tried to set a pose with the fingers(or any bones) they snapped back to they’re original position. Any idea why.
well I managed to solve my problem a few weeks back, and then I finally got around to finishing the tutorial. The problem was that under the object properies, under duplication I had FRAMES turned on, when I switched it to NONE it worked. Thanks for a great tutorial, and the nanu nanu was good for a chuckle.