This Blender addon will save you hours of animation

hi everyone this is P from P2 design switching parents or dependency is very common in 3D animation for example when animating props like two-handed weapons a rifle a sword whatever but the problem is when switching parent or dependency if you don't have a dedicated script or tool your props will awkwardly move away and you will have to con animate by hand to match the current or previous motion or position and that is painful fortunately the blender devs got us covered before we start this tutorial though I'd like to congratulate sou shorty for his amazing waterm long girl short movie it's a 5 years project he did on his own and the result is incredible so go watch it but first watch my tutorial please and then show him support by commenting giving him a like whatever you can to spread the word now let's get started we will use this shot as an example the animated props being this double-sided sword so let's jump in blender in this shot the sword comes from the background and as it comes toward the foreground our character kibali grabs it while flying the SS controller is bound to the root of the rig and on the next frame it's bound to the hand controller what I would like to do is to switch parent and bind the sword to the hand on the previous frame so that I get a clean transition but right now it's not the case moving the hand won't move the sword if I check out my R properties I can see that I can switch the parent of the sword so it's a very classic mechanism I'm really happy I build it but whenever I switch the parent of the sword controller to be the left hand the sword teleports somewhere else I like to be able to switch parent keeping the current visual transform of the sword controller and here is the tool that will save you hours of animation by the way if you'd like to learn how I created all those custom rigs from scratch and even more about triing check out my latest course on P2 design academy.com the art of itive riging second edition to solve our problem there is an existing add-on that is shipped with blender by default go to edit preferences and open the addon tabs in the search bar search for copy you should see under animation the copy Global transform add-on popping out let's activate the add-on and go back to our animation a new tab is now available in the end panel it's the animation Tab and we can find our I done here if I get back to my rig and I switch the parent of the sword as before the sword disappear so what I can do before is to select my S controller go to the addon and click on copy we just start the global transformation of our sword through my rig properties I can now switch to parent the sword will disappear again out of the screen but with it still selected I can go back to the and click on the paste button and I just paste the global transform to the sword while its parent has changed the sword has exactly the same visual transform as before but I can now animate it using the hand of my character allowing me to transition between two different binding and this is a huge time saer and the Adon can do much more let's say I attached the weapon to the left arm of my character and I'm happy with the POS but now the director says yeah but he's a right-handed character so he should manipulate the sword with the other hand so I will switch parent but the sword is still in the left hand I now need to move it by hand to the other side or I can go to Theon copy the current Global transform of our sword and then in the mirror option I can choose my character rig and the root as a pivot point and click mirror the glob Global transform of the sword will be mirrored based on the root position of the character and as a symmetry reference you can use any bone or any object in your SC now let's say you want to copy the position or Global transform of your bone or object on multiple key frames that can be useful for an inverse kinematics controller for example a hand on a table or an elbow a knee contacting something first I copy the current global transer form but then I can't use space to selected keys because we need to enable the auto king as I enable it the option is now available from there I can select the key frame of the current controller on which I want to paste the current pose and as I do so you can see that my controller get mirrored the function works but whenever you have a mirror object selected it will automatically paste as mirrored if I canel it and paste to selected Keys again you can see that all the keys I have selected use the same pose and it's no longer mirrored not that I'm using the term pose but it's the global transform of the controller if it was an object we couldn't talk about the pose because the pose is bound to rigging in blender but in both case we are copying the global transform of the active item now here is a last example if you use motion capture I don't but I've seen this problem a lot where the data used on another rig might not match perfectly and you have a lot of noise on contact I can set up the pose of my foot copy it and then I can click paste and bake the current Global transform the foot will be pinned on the ground whatever happens to the rest of my character I believe this is a great feature to clean up animation data did you know that you don't need to change tab all the time to access the tool you can right click on a panel and pin it it will be then accessible whatever tab you're in thanks again sain for the tip the main limit with this addon is that you can deal only with the active bone or object and sometimes you may want to copy multiple bones Global transform at once it's super useful if you want to copy a posst for example but you have root motion or again if you have a parent switch for example hand parented to the Torso and then to the world space here for example I post K but let's say for whatever reason I want to move the root of my character but I want to keep the pose in place you may want that if you want to change the orientation of the whole rig or if you want to change the starting point of a sequence the first thing I need to do is to select the controllers I want to copy the global Transformer from then I can click copy word I can move the root bone wherever I want it you may also want to move the root bone or you may want to parent it to the camera or to an asset like a vehicle or something like that but maybe you want your character to start from the previous position now I just need to reselect my controller but the root bone and press paste word and here I get exactly the same pose of the character the controllers have the same position or same transform in World space but the root has moved so basically they don't have the same pose but visually it's the same and you can't imagine how many time you will need to do this kind of thing whenever you're animating a shot I'm not necessarily talking about the root motion but at least copying and pasting a pose in Space the last feature I want to show is the c Cy relative option I have selected the same controller and made the Torso controller active and I click copy relative this will store the transform of the different controllers using the Torso controller space if I now change the controller position and I reselect my controllers and I then choose paste relative my controller pose is updated following the rotation or the transformation of the Torso controller this way you can repace replicate the whole pose but with a different orientation for example whatever the relationship your controllers have between them I'm sure there are many times where you struggled posing your character because you were changing mechanism hopefully these addons can help this is the end of this video I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you very very soon man

Channel: Pierrick Picaut

Views: 75,188

Keywords: blender3D, modeling, shading, rigging, B3D, p2design, sculpting, digital, animation, cartooning, rendering, CYCLES, tutorial, Pierrick, Picaut, Pieriko, 3D, Computer, Graphic, blender, eevee, VIDEO GAME, rig, animate, stylised, best, Blender, art, digital art

Id: LIIijxlFf-8

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024