Help with setting up arm controls


#1

Hey everyone. I’m a newcomer to rigging and I’ve run into a snag when it comes to setting up the FK arm controls on a character. I’ve been following the Digital Tutors course “Character Rigging for Production in Maya” closely (I’m using Maya 2013), and I already have my IK arms and even my IK/FK switch set up. That said, when I follow the FK set up lesson, the joints don’t follow the control curves I made at all. To give you guys some context, this is what I’ve been doing:

[ul]
[li]Create and place the control curves at the appropriate joints (shoulder, elbow, wrist) by holding the “v” key to snap them in place and freezing their transformations
[/li][li]Create locators for each joint
[/li][li]Parent the locators to their respective joints, zero the values on the locators and then unparent them from the joints
[/li][li]Orient constraining the joints to the locators
[/li][li]And lastly, parenting the locators to the control curves
[/li][/ul]

According to the tutorial, this should work. However, the joints are static and will not move, even if I change the rotation and joint orientation in the Attribute Editor. The locators and control curves work fine, they just don’t have any influence over the joints. I have feeling that the issue might be related to the IK handle, but after a lot of google searching for an answer I can’t confirm nor deny that feeling. Any insight would be crazy helpful.


#2

You have one single joint chain for IK and FK ? If yes, then the problem is probably that the IKhandle is still enabled when you rotate the FK controllers. Your IK/FK switch should be connected to the attribute called ikBlend (or something similar) on your ikHandle.


#3

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