Cedric Bazillou posts a great article on a common procedure that can be found in many character rigs which is space switching or dynamic parenting. as Cedric notes, “All the following story started after reading a post on maulik blog. His attempt at writing a group Constraint made me want to see if I would be able to came up with a stable implementation in order to use less nodes and provide a more streamlined workflow.”
Cedric discusses what Space Switching should be able to do and takes a look at current ways of creating a dynamic switching node in Maya by providing some examples from resources. Cedric also discusses some features of more advanced systems, and shows off a demonstration of his own implementation.
Cedric Bazillou writes: This is a demo of a custom maya node in order to use less nodes and provide a more streamlined workflow for space switching. No script is used to store or compute offset between parent at the switching frame, and thus no additional animation curve or array attribute are needed. This system remains also stable in playback mode and allows you to jump from any frame.