Resetting ONLY ONE JOINT when posing in Blender.

Yeah, you know you're drooling over this one. ;) And go straight to the bottom. That's where the 'how to reset only one joint part really is. -Sunny

 

For starters, I want you to see what the pose is supposed to look like without the dots and lines of the joints and bones. The face is fully posed, as are the arms and hands. I like this pose! I'm happy with it. But to start with we do not want the Hide Bones on. So don't copy me. This is just to show that the face and body is posed.

So, now we've got our bones and joints showing again You need to select a joint, any joint it doesn't matter. When you've selected your joint I want you to bring up the Pose Tools menu. You do this by hitting the 'T' key on your keyboard. It'll pop up on the left. There it is, yay!

I've purposely bungled the neck of my pose. It's a mess isn't it! I really don't want to take the time to try and untwist that boogered joint so instead I want to reset it. But I like the rest of my pose and want to keep it, so this is what we're going to do. First of all, in the joint tree on the upper right find your problem joint in the tree menu. You might have to scroll around and click on some plus signs to find it. Luckily, the tree will help guide you. The base of the joint you need will be a lighter grey and you can follow the plus signs until you find the one where the little bone icon is in a circle. That's the one you need. Make note of where it is.

First, you will hit the 'A' on your keyboard twice so that all the joints are highlighted light blue. Once you've got the joints all selected go to the tree menu and find that joint (or joints) you want to reset. Right click on the joint and select Deselect. Repeat this on all the joints you need to reset.

 

You'll notice on the tree that there is not a circle on the offending joint. You can also see the single black dot on Harriet (the rig.)
Once you've deselected the offending joint go to the Pose Tools Menu and select Copy. Now click on any joint on your rig, and import another rig. You can either use File-> Import or the Load CLIP button on the S3PY menu.

Once the new rig is loaded, you will go back to your Pose Tools Menu and click on Paste.

NOTE: If the joint you did NOT copy (ie: the joint you want to reset) is posed on the imported rig, when you paste the other joints onto this rig the joint you wanted to reset will be posed as it was in the imported rig.

Boom! The rig is going to snap back down to the pose as I liked it previously, minus the neck boogering.

NOTE: The neck was posed on my imported pose and when I pasted the other joints on, the neck went into the position it was before you pasted it on.

 

Here's a close up to show that the neck has indeed reset to a non boogered state. The face is the same, the body is the same. Awesome right? Now you can continue your pose as you were on your way before. YAY!!! Just remember to rename the pose when you export it. Otherwise you'll just save over the pose you imported. K?

Now, What if you like something, say the hand, and want to put it on other poses. Like, maybe your sim has a quirk and holds their hand a certain way all the time. Ok. Let's take one aspect of our pose and using our copy and paste technique and apply it on a smaller scale

For this, we're going to grab that hand. To start with, you will select all the joints you want to put on a different pose. To select more than one joint you can right click-select the joints in the joint tree in the upper right (or mid right depending on how your screen is set up) or you can right click on them all while holding shift down. Whatever works for you. You'll notice we've already got the Pose Tools menu up. If you don't, just hit T on your keyboard to bring it up. Make sure you have at least one joint on your rig selected when you hit T though, or you'll just bring up the Object Tools menu instead of the Pose Tools Menu.
Since we have all the joints selected we want to copy, we're going to go ahead and hit copy in the Pose Tools Menu.

Now go ahead and import the rig you want to put the copied joints on.
When your rig opens you'll notice the same joints are selected as you just copied. Woot!
Go ahead and click paste in your Pose Tools Menu.

Voila! There's the newly pasted hand joints all ready to go!


NOTE: Copying and Pasting between two open Blender windows DOES NOT WORK. For instance, you want HER hand on a male rig and so open a male rig in a separate window (Meaning: you didn't append the male rig in) and attempt to Paste the joints onto the separate rig you will just get an Error: Copy (something or other) Is Empty. Could you copy something between two rigs that are Appended together? I bet you could. I still haven't tested this yet though. I'm just so excited to have discovered this that I'm trying to get this up NAOW! lol

Alright. Now what about copying and pasting between different sized rigs? For example between Harriet or Fred and the Toddler Rig (What was the toddler Rigs name Gem?) Alright, lets take a look.

Well, that was unexpected. I'd opened my femaleRig (Harriet) and appended in the Toddler Rig. Then I copied all the joints in her left arm from shoulder down and pasted them onto the Toddler Rig. No stretching! How about the other way? Lets take the Toddlers left leg and put it on Harriet.

No distortions! Her foot is only cocked forward like that because she is bent at the waist slightly. Now what if we were to copy Harriet's pose in it's entirety? Would the face stretch on the toddler?

Nope! However, the Toddler rig moved into that position automatically. I didn't put it there. This leads me to assume that when I copy the joints from one rig to a smaller rig Blender copies the movements of the joints exactly. When I moved the adult rig down using the B_Root_bind joint (The crosshairs in her pelvis?) I moved it down a certain amount. When it moves it on the smaller rig it moves it the same amount, even though the smaller rigs b_root_bind joint is already farther down. Hence why the toddler rig is underneath the adult rig.

Now, how about the other way around?

Going back to the Toddler Rig having Harriet's arm copied onto it, then we copy that pose to Harriet. Harriet immediately snaps to this position when the joins are pasted onto her. However, in this instance she is in exactly the same position as the Toddler Rig(you can see their anchors to their right.) So when scaling up, Blender does not change the root position. I'm not positive why it would work the other way, and not this way but at this rate I'm just thrilled to have learned this much.

Now for more practical application:

I like this pose. It's nicely closed and standoffish. And I've got a sims party coming up where that b***h shows up wearing the exact same dress as my sim and I want her to react. That body is perfect. The face?

Uhm, while I have uses for that face it's not quite the "That B***H!" face I want. I need more annoyance.

So I've appended in the rig that has an appropriately annoyed expression and moved her out of the way. Notice the joints are not hidden again. I know it makes it harder to see for a tutorial but the Pose Tools menu will not come up with the joints hidden and that menu is kind of crucial.

Then I select all the joints I want to copy. Remember that sometimes there are multiple joints in a single location and sometimes you've got to right-click multiple times to get those joints to highlight. Open the Pose Tools Menu, and select Copy when you've got all the facial muscles selected.

Then select the original Harriet again and paste. New face, same pose! So nice. So.Easy. So fast!

I've tried this method in game copying between adult and toddler poses (toddler in adult pose, adult in toddler pose) with the correct animations in, and without the correct animations in (meaning I did NOT import the a_xvets in) and it works just fine in game. The bones are not stretched and the poses took the first time I inputted the names. A word of caution though, a lot of poses will need slight adjustments to correct clipping. If you are pasting an adult pose onto a child you need to pay particular attention to the arms as they tend to be closer to the body and will sometimes clip.

Also- a far easier way to reset just one joint? (THANKS -A-!) Is to go to the Pose menu at the bottom and click it. Then select the submenu Clear Transform. Then select All. Much much faster and easier for resetting just one joint in Blender. ;)