Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Advanced Tutorials/Advanced Animation/Guided tour/Armature/pose

Posemode is a very versatile place where you Animate your character, create and manage constraints and apply your rig to your character.

Contrary to Editmode, Pose mode isn't an obligatory mode where you can't do anything else. It's now part of the UI like any other object. A good example of it is you can be in posemode and still select another object.

So What Can You Do?

When you are done building your armature, you can go into Posemode to add constraints and start creating actions. There are also some new tools accessible in Posemode that you may want to look at. You can easily get into "pose" mode by selecting the mode from IPO type list box in the left portion of the lower screen.

The panel has changed a bit too:

• What's new in the panels?:
  • You can use the Automatic IK feature in the Editbutton(F9) to pose a chain of bones like it was an ik chain. It's usefulness is very limited though. It works well only if there is no other ik solver in the chain, and if your chain is isolated from the rest of the rig.
  • Ghost: in the armature panel the ghost option lets you see the action linked to the armature over time. Also called onion skinning.
    
  • There are two number fields to better tweak the effect of B-Bones. The in/out is used to tell the scale of the virtual handle of the bezier curve. In is the Root of the bone, and Out is the Tip. The bigger the value, the bigger the effect of rotation.
    
  • There is now a Constraint panel where you can add a constraint to a bone, like any other object in the scene. This will be shown later.

• You can pose your rig using GKEY, SKEY and RKEY. Note that if the bone is part of a chain it can't be moved (except if it's the first of the chain, moving all the chain as they are all children), so you rotate the bone instead.
• You can do ALT-SKEY on one or more bones while in Envelope display mode to tweak the envelope size in real time while animating. Useful when for example you move the hand and some part of the character isn't in the influence zone; the result will be that some vertices will stay behind.
• You can do CTRL-CKEY to copy stuff from a bone to bones. The options are location, rotation, scale and constraint. Constraint is very handy when you wan to copy a constraint to other bone. The way it works is easy.
• The W-KEY menu gets some neat options too:
  • Select constraint target: Will select the target of the bone's constraint currently selected.
  • Flip name: Yep, you can flip name in Posemode too.
  • Calculate/Clear path: This is a visual way to see the action linked to your armature. You can select just some bones and ask Blender to show you the paths of the bones.
    
• You can pose your character and select all bones you want to see included in the action and press I-KEY. You can insert a key just for loc, rot or size. Avail will add a key to all available channels in IPO window (all channels you previously added something).
• When you insert key for your armature, a new action is created and linked to the armature if there was no action before. You can also see the curves of each selected bone of the armature in the IPO window. We will see action window and IPO window later.
• You can parent a bone to an external object by selecting this object then selecting the bone in question so it's active (The armature is in Posemode so you can select a bone). Do CTRL-PKEY. Then when you move the bone the object will follow. This kind of Hard relationship doesn't include any bending at all. It's useful when doing robot rigs as you are just moving objects around.