An alternate way to use Transform Constraint?

skarasuko

I pondered about a theoretical way Transform Constraint could handle the bones, specifically with Translate, in an attempt to minimize keying in the Dopesheet. In my small example, the focus is on the orange child bone. It's target is on an individual bone colored in purple and its Translate Mix is 100%.

What I really want is to duplicate the parent (red) and child bone, representing the different limbs of a character, and unify the up and down movement of all the child bones while they are parented. The current method I see for now is not to use Transform Constraints and key in the Translate for each child bone.

Is there a feature in Spine that could address this somehow? There are a couple instances I can think of encountering, personally, such as having a lot of different machinery parts that unify the same exact pumping mechanic. The last two images simply have the child bones at 0% Translate Mix and are manually moving up and down.

Erika

Hello! A transform constraint can have multiple constrained bones all with the same settings. You can see this in action in the Tank example on the wheels.
Tank example: Wheels

You can also take advantage of the local and relative settings to orient a bone differently into space Transform Constraints - Spine User Guide: Options

I hope this answers your question, otherwise I'll need further clarification 😃

skarasuko

Checking Local and then clicking Match did the trick. Thank you! I had no idea what these options really did.

On a side note, perhaps the Spine guide could use a lot of gifs demonstrating the fundamental effect of the features right now.

Also, could I get an explanation about the use of the "Relative" option. I'm confused on the description.