[Diaries - Advanced] Inverse Kinematics - How to Make Blender Feels Like Garry's Mod (Patreon)

When we animate in Blender, a lot of people might feel that it is a tedious process, since we have to move each bone to create a certain pose. However, this does not have to be the case. We can use a single bone to move chains of skeletons up to a certain length. To do this, we need to use Inverse Kinematics Bone Constraint.

To apply Inverse Kinematics to a bone, we must first do this in pose mode. After that, select the bone that serves as a "tail". 

A tail refers to a bone located at the skeleton's edge. For example, we want to create a forward motion by lifting the legs up while bending the knee. In this case, the "tail" should be the foot's bone. But what about the toes? isn't it the "last child" of the leg skeleton? To answer this question, we need to take a look at our priorities - do we want to bend the model's toe? or do we want to keep the toe straight while the foot is above the ground? -  In this case, because we want to create a walking motion instead of bending each of the toes of our model, the "tail" for the inverse kinematics should be the foot's bone.

But "tail" does not exist in the constraint variables. What should we do with this information? The tail serves as a guide as to where we will apply the constraint. In this case, the leg bone below the knee is the bone where Inverse Kinematics should be applied.

After that, set the target as <<your rig>> with <<foot's bone>> as the bone target. Additionally, set the chain length to 2, since the bones that get impacted are the upper leg bone (femur) and feet bone. The chain length can be modified according to the scenario that you face.

To learn more about inverse kinematics, consider checking the official blender tutorial at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-2v_CKmVE8