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  • Enable Constraints Offset (Match) in Animate mode

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There have been situations when I wished I could set the Offset of my Transform Constraints in Animate mode, usually as a way to set various behaviors for the same bone. It's really hard for me to explain examples of my experience, but this would be useful if I needed different profiles of a character's body part. However, the main issue for me is that I am using the same set of bones for completely different characters. I use Animations to change all of the bones to match each character's proportions, so there is a problem for me when I can only adjust the Offset of the Constraints in Setup mode.

The more cumbersome alternative for me would be to:

  1. Copy the coordinates of the main bone in Animate mode and apply in Setup mode.
  2. Click "Match" and copy the data of the Offset.
  3. Undo the coordinates of the main bone.
  4. Manually input the copied data of the Offset.

I want to simply remove these steps and have the Offset feature unlocked in Animate mode.

It seems OK to allow for animate mode, done in 4.0.36. We try to keep things that modify the setup pose only possible in setup mode, so you don't think that you are only modifying your skeleton and accidentally modify the setup pose. For some things it helps to modify them in animate mode, like weights, so we can make an exception.

While I pondered about using Skin Constraints before, it is too much work to get it set up correctly and can cause all sorts of problems for animating my characters in detail. There has to be a lot of extra bones on each joint area (funny how it goes back to my previous topic about bones in the same position). What also makes diving deep in Skin Constraints risky is the conflict of various Transform Constraints that could happen. And it can also make my Constraints list very long.

Also, thank you very much Nate!

Nate wrote

done in 4.0.36.

:nerd: excited!

The best option until then is to not use Offset at all and create a new bone to act as your offset (I call them 'null' bones) made specifically for transform constraint. This way you can still adjust your constrained bone placement with a simple global copy/paste, turn on/off the constrains when necessary, and key the position of the null to move the constrain if needed.