Manual Bone Rotation

Andaharoo

Is there any way I can set the world rotation of a bone? I want to angle the bow my character is holding but if a track plays that has transformations on that frame its just all applied when drawn.

Basically I don't want any rotations applied on the arm from any animations while the bow is drawn and the player is aiming. But I still want the transformations from other bones like the legs. So I could walk and draw a bow.

Also I would prefer a solution with code rather than doing something drastic like creating a separate run animation where only the arms are animated and when running apply it and when running and drawing bow dont apply the arm run animation.

Right now Im doing this

animation.skeleton.FindBone("front_upper_arm").Rotation = ...

But I need to be changing the animations rotation not the skeletons rotation.

Nate

Apply the animation, update the skeleton's world transform, then adjust the bone's rotation, then update the skeleton's world transform again.

One way to set the rotation is to adjust the local rotation like this:

Bone bone = animation.skeleton.FindBone("front_upper_arm");
...
bone.Rotation += targetRotation - bone.WorldRotation.

Note this doesn't take into account any skewing, which happens by inheriting nonuniform scale or be using the Shear tool.

You probably don't want to call FindBone a lot, as it does string comparisons with all the bone names. This is true with any method named FindXxx.

Another way to do this is to use single bone IK. With that, instead of setting the bone's rotation, you'd set the IK target's position where you want the bone to point.