Remove IK linked bone from some animations

smerzlia

Hi,
I have followed the SpineBoy pro sample code to create an animation which has an arm which follows the mouse position on the screen. I'm using a bone called 'CrossHair' which uses an IK constraint on an arm bone to following the mouse position. It sort of works.

How can I create an animation without the 'crosshair' bone, as all my animations have it. I would like to have a walk animation separate from the 'aim' and 'shoot' animations. Currently I am forced to place the crosshair below the character so that walking works without their arm pointing forward - a bad hack to say the least.

I have tried to remove the bone from the 'walk' animation in the 'animate' view (dopesheet?) but it does not let me - it just deletes the bone.

Thx

smerzlia

Abelius

This is very similar to this post...: Prevent Mixing For Constraints

The same answer I gave there applies to your case. You either need to use a separate animation playing on a higher track, or a skin constraint to set the IK to 100.

Both ways allow you to create animations like walk, idle, crouch, etc., and still have the character aim when he draws his weapon.

This is the concept behind the multiple tracks solution:
Applying Animations - Spine Runtimes Guide: Tracks

And this is for the skin constraint one:
Runtime Skins - Spine Runtimes Guide

In both cases you'll need to coordinate with your coder, in case it's another person.

smerzlia

Thanks for the resources.. Part of the issue is knowing the right terminology before asking questions( ie "mixing constraints").

My Spine enlightenment journey continues....

The coder part is easy - that's me. I have got the runtimes to work in my programming language of choice, just needed to fix the Spine side of things.

Abelius

Awesome.

Just one thing I forgot to mention: Spine sets IKs to 100 value when creating them, but in most cases you don't want that for the setup pose (you'll prefer to activate/set them to 100 when needed). Maybe that's the reason you were trying to make a walk/aim animation in the first place. :p

So yeah, just set their values to 0 in setup.

Erika

Well answered, Abelius!

Here are some resources to expand on the comments above:
Constraints: Mix
Preview view - Spine User Guide: Tracks

Example of step by step tutorial that uses different constraint settings in between animate and setup:
Blog: Holding a two-handed weapon

Explanation of the Spineboy project:
Spineboy example: Aiming