Exploring space swapping options

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The arms legs and torso are now rigged.

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Although we do still need to add in the roll

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and twist joint functionality plus some squash and stretch.

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Before we do that though, I wanted to explore some space swapping options.

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I will focus on the elbow pull vector controls and also the IK hand controls.

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But these options can be applied to anything. Really.

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Let's look at the elbow control first.

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What we want to give the animator is the

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option for this control to stay in world space.

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So basically as it is now

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or we want the option to also make it follow the arm I control,

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you will notice that I've added a follow attribute

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which we will be using to switch between the two states.

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OK? Let's open the node editor.

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Let's bring in both controls. So the elbow and arm controls,

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let's hide the shape nodes too.

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We don't need them at this point,

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just move these over

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because we want to move between the two states.

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We need a way to swap or blend between them.

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We can do this with a blend matrix node,

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press tab and create one

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and let's rename it to arm PV, left space blend.

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Let's hop over to the attribute editor

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and open these.

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So up here under the input matrix tab,

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we define the world space position of the elbow control.

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So we essentially record where it is now

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down here. We can use the add new item button to create new targets for it.

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Again, we've touched upon this before.

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First, we need to store the elbow controls position.

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So we need these values here.

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Let's copy this tab so we can reference it.

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OK. So we need the blend node over here

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and all we need to do is copy the values across. So from here

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to here,

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OK. That's stored and it will act as the world space position.

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Now,

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you're probably wondering why I didn't just connect

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the nodes and then disconnect them again.

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Now basically, if you do this,

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the values will appear and as soon as you disconnect them,

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the values will disappear.

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So this is why we have to manually copy them across.

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Let's add another item. Now,

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here we go.

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So we can now connect the arm eye care control to this new section.

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So the elbow control can move to it and follow as it moves.

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So take world matrix zero and connect it to the blend nodes, target, target zero,

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target zero, target matrix attribute.

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Wow, that is a mouthful.

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Now we want this to drive the elbow control.

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So connect the blend matrix nodes output matrix

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to the R PV controls, offset parent matrix attribute.

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OK. So we can see the control has now moved to the wrist.

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Let's open this back up

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and close this.

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We can now use the envelope slider to blend between the two states.

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So now the control is in world space. So it doesn't follow the arm control.

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Just bring back the note editor.

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If we set envelope to one,

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the control moves back to the hand control

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and then it follows as it moves.