Leg rig: how to make a knee target?

cessen · Post by **cessen** » Sun Feb 05, 2006 8:42 pm

How do you make a knee target in Blender? For instance, an Empty that the knee will always point at. I've been trying a myriad of things on my own, none of which have worked.

I've been searching all around for an answer to this. I made an Elysiun post, I asked on both the blender and blendercoders IRC channels. So far no solution. It seems ridiculous that there would be no way to do this in Blender, because it's essential to building a controllable rig.

Here's the Elysiun post (complete with a .blend file): http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=60756

This is my last resort before e-mailing Ton himself.

So please answer. We don't want to distract Ton from project Orange, do we?

LetterRip · Post by **LetterRip** » Sun Feb 05, 2006 11:03 pm

ask in #blenderchat or #blenderqa

Both tend to have people that are more familiar with Blender usage than either of the two channels you tried.

LetterRip

cessen · Post by **cessen** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 4:14 am

Ah, thanks LetterRip.

But be forewarned, if I can't find answers there, I'll be back.

hdd · Post by **hdd** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 2:01 am

try using Locked Track.
L.

cessen · Post by **cessen** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 7:58 am

I figured out a way to do it. The solution .blend file is posted on the Elysiun thread.

hdd: It's not as simple or intuitive as switching to a Locked Track constraint. I had tried that already. Getting a properly functioning knee target in Blender is actually fairly involved. I have a feeling I'm the first person to have done it... all of the example rigs people linked to had faulty knee targets, with the same problems I was trying to get rid of.

The only problem with my solution is that it can't be done entirely inside the armature object, so (I believe) that means you can't really use it with the actions editor or NLA system. But the rig behaves exactly as it should.

Please go to the Elysiun thread I linked to above for further discussion. Please do not reply here--I'd rather keep it all in one place.