Animation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 209

infl uence is keyed to 0.0, you will need to set a keyframe on the object, using the VisualLocRot keying
method. Then when the infl uence of the constraint disappears, the object will remain in place.
Obviously, this technique is useful even if your character is not lifting something. Anything that will be stuck
to your character temporarily—a cat with claws dug in, a cup balanced on her head, or a fork stuck in his
cheek—can use this same technique.

NOTE
The production fi les for The Beast that are included on the disc do not use the Child Of con-
straint. At the time of the production, the constraint did not function properly due to several
bugs. It is working properly now.

Hold On!

When animating, you may want to have your character hold on to some stationary object or set piece. If you
remember back in the chapter on rigging, this is one of the situations where you would want to use a tradi-
tional targeted IK solution (weight-bearing bone chains should use full IK). Even if your arms are not rigged
with full IK, you can still make it work.
Blender allows you to attach localized constraints to a proxied armature so that you can build nice little con-
straint networks that are specifi c to your shot without altering the master asset fi le.
In The Beast , shot 11.2 required the Beast to brace himself by holding onto the kitchen windowsill. In the
shot fi le, the targetless IK constraint that already existed on the right hand bone was simply altered in the
local fi le to target an Empty that was added at the appropriate location on the windowsill. Figure 11.40
shows the hand on the sill. Note the hand bone's
yellow color, which indicates that it is using prop-
erly targeted IK.

This functionality makes Blender's rigging system
even more fl exible because you can safely build
your rig to function well (and simply) for 95% of
your shots, trusting that you can rig a “minisolu-
tion” in the one or two shots that require some-
thing more complex.
If you are adding entirely new constraints to a
bone, and it has existing constraints from the mas-
ter asset fi le, the new constraints will always appear
after the “master” constraints. Should you need to
override the master constraints, you can simply set
their infl uence to 0.0 and recreate them as local
versions to rearrange and deal with as you like.

Figure 11.40 You can alter constraints on a proxy for individual

shots