Gaelstrom
07-30-2006, 12:39 AM
Hello everyone,
I've recently attempted rigging in Maya for a class, but I didn't like the class's rig. I am used to Max's biped and am very comfortable and happy with the ability to freely switch between IK and FK by simply grabbing the corresponding arm or hand. While researching the 3-arm methods everyone seems to like I noticed that attached to the IK locator was an already included IK Blend which did what I was looking for. I didn't find anything here regarding what I was trying and decided to ask.
I created a circle to control orientation of the hand, allowing my fingers full FK control no matter what, and attempted to use the locator's attribute to do the IKFKswitch. (I was going to parent constrain boxes to the fingers like I did with the spine for biped-esque control)
Here is what I did. I orient constrained the Control (circle) to the wrist bone. I set up a wrist rotation with the connection editor from the Control to my second forearm bone. Now since my desire was to get the IK control to follow the FK motion so there is no snap (as everyone seems to run into) I parent constrained the translates of the locator to the Control.
This, I found, seemed to perfectly allow the switch and no snapping, the one problem is the Control gets left behind during FK. When I attempted to point constrain the wrist to the locator, I finally hit my problem. I'm unable to animate because I get an error and keyframing anything makes it unhappy.
Anyway, I really would appreciate some help to get around this problem. I wanted to find out why people wouldn't do this instead of the 3 arm method and I may have found why, but I wanted to ask for more information about the 3-arm benefits and if this method could still work.
As a secondary question, if I truly must do the 3-arm method is there a non-script method to keep all the arms on top of one another? All methods I've seen don't really make that much sense to me and I know no scripting. I appreciate any help.
Thanks very much
I've recently attempted rigging in Maya for a class, but I didn't like the class's rig. I am used to Max's biped and am very comfortable and happy with the ability to freely switch between IK and FK by simply grabbing the corresponding arm or hand. While researching the 3-arm methods everyone seems to like I noticed that attached to the IK locator was an already included IK Blend which did what I was looking for. I didn't find anything here regarding what I was trying and decided to ask.
I created a circle to control orientation of the hand, allowing my fingers full FK control no matter what, and attempted to use the locator's attribute to do the IKFKswitch. (I was going to parent constrain boxes to the fingers like I did with the spine for biped-esque control)
Here is what I did. I orient constrained the Control (circle) to the wrist bone. I set up a wrist rotation with the connection editor from the Control to my second forearm bone. Now since my desire was to get the IK control to follow the FK motion so there is no snap (as everyone seems to run into) I parent constrained the translates of the locator to the Control.
This, I found, seemed to perfectly allow the switch and no snapping, the one problem is the Control gets left behind during FK. When I attempted to point constrain the wrist to the locator, I finally hit my problem. I'm unable to animate because I get an error and keyframing anything makes it unhappy.
Anyway, I really would appreciate some help to get around this problem. I wanted to find out why people wouldn't do this instead of the 3 arm method and I may have found why, but I wanted to ask for more information about the 3-arm benefits and if this method could still work.
As a secondary question, if I truly must do the 3-arm method is there a non-script method to keep all the arms on top of one another? All methods I've seen don't really make that much sense to me and I know no scripting. I appreciate any help.
Thanks very much