Matrix Driven Constraints

This is my first official professional post and start to a Rigging / Character TD blog. This is more of a reference for myself but I also hope this will help whoever happened to stumble across this.

For my first post I will be reviewing and displaying one of many ways to integrate a space switch using nothing but matrix nodes. First things first, I'll define what I mean by "space switch" and the reason of even having one. A space switch is used in rigs to tell a controller to follow another object, or another "space". So think of having a controller parent constrained to two objects and those are the spaces. Space switches are really useful for animators to have, especially on creature/character rigs. It's really useful to animators because sometimes they need hands to follow the hips instead of the chest.

When creating space switches in rigs, you could easily create a constraint with multiple targets and call it a day.

As you probably know, this works fine as long as everything is carefully built and there are few offsets. Often times you'll have bigger offsets and constraints just are giving you realistic expectations. To help solve this issue, I've come up with a clean and relatively easy way of using Maya's matrix nodes in place of constraints. Below I'll show a glimpse of what the end result will look like.

More detail will be added to this post as time permits.