From BlenderWiki
Editable Bone Paths
From time to time, this request pops up (just like the many other long standing requests). As seen in Reflex (http://www.digitalfish.com/), motion paths should be able to be edited, in order to allow the animator to work as naturally as possible (and be able to tweak their arcs interactively).
Implementing this is not really that difficult, once a few core functions have been established:
- convert from motion to curve data
- already done with the existing code
- convert from curve data to motion
- this could be hacked/faked by making a temp object that follows the path, have the bone use a stretchto constraint pointing to that temp object, and inserting visualkeys for the data
One way such a system to edit these paths could be implemented by adding a new "Paths Mode" for Armatures. A user would select the bone(s) that they wish to edit the motion paths of, enter this mode to tweak like editing normal Blender curves, then exit and have all their changes fixed. This sort of system is (possibly) the easiest to code, and means that there wouldn't be trouble trying to select bones but ending up selecting curve points instead. It does have the downside that the user needs to switch modes, which could get quite annoying.
Incremental Updates of Bone Paths
The current workflow of constantly having to tell Blender to recalculate paths after altering the pose/adjusting timing is clumsy, especially in a production workflow.
Needed is an option to update the parts of the paths that have changed after a change (in some ways only).
