Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook

Setting up the shoulders

When the animator is posing a character's arm (specially when using FK), it's often required to have two opposite features for their shoulder: with or without rotation inheritance from the torso. This is also called a "hinged" shoulder, when it doesn't inherit the rotation.

The "hinged" shoulder technique is very useful for enabling the animator to rotate the character's torso and have its arms still on the same direction. This affords similar independence to the arms from the torso as found in IK setups, while still allowing the animator to work in FK mode to have a finer control over the animation arcs.

How to do it...

1. Open the file 005-Shoulders.blend. It has our character model with an FK setup for his arms, ready for ...