IK chain on a fitted object? (Or otherwise parenting a specific bone rather than a whole figure)

Matt_Castle

I've got part of a dForce mesh that I want to be able to control through rigged bones, and although those bones have been fairly easy to set up, I'm now in the position I need to be able to lock those handles to other objects.

Although some other programs I'd use would comfortably let you lock/reparent bones however you liked, the closest thing I could think of for DS is using the IK system, and although that seems to work (to an extent) when the mesh is not fitted to another object, it refuses to respond to the control once it's fitted.

The bone names I've used are not duplicated on the model it's fitted to, and I've tried adding in additional intervening bones so that the IK solver has bones to adjust that do not need to be matched to parents on the figure it's fitted to. So those things aren't the issue here.

Is there some way to parent a specific bone in this context so that they can be attached to other objects independently of the rest of the figure, and still work when the figure is fitted? Being able to apply parent constraints to specific bones seems like such a simple thing to need to do, but I'm just hitting headaches here.

(I will add that things like Dforce magnets won't work in this context; the reason the part of the mesh is rigged rather than dForced is because it needs to be rigid, so I can't rely on the dForce engine to drag it into place).