HumanIK feet-to-floor contact?

#1

I find that, with maya, there’s always a lot of “talk” about a specific feature with never any clear documentation about how one can actually go about “using” it.

One of these is the HumanIK feet-to-floor contact where one can make feet (and even hands) of humanik characters respond naturally to and type of specified floor.

But after I create skeleton, position bones, create controls and rig . . . my characters feet keeps going through the floor during animation. Maybe I’m just extremely noob with maya, but what must I do to get feet to react to floor?

I’ve always been seeing “if feet to floor contact is enabled…blah blah blah” but I have never actually seen any documentation telling me HOW to enable it, neither have I seen any such options in the humanik dialog (to the best of my checking).

If this feature does exist, it is my humble opinion that it is not at all intuitive to find.
Does anyone know how to go about enabling this?

#2

its there and it works as advertised…think its under HIK node

Its literally just a check box to turn it on …its great if your floor is planar, but if its not youll be doing it manually

#3

Nah I believe the checkbox you’re talking about only factors in during animation retargeting.

I’m using HIK like a normal rig for animating in Maya 2011 but there is no hand/feet-to-floor constraint like there is in FBIK. This complicates animations where I require realistic IK behavior and knee bending when my character’s foot hits the floor e.g after a jump.

I did notice one thing. I’ll try to explain with ascii art :wip:
A good foot rig looks something like this:

|
\ _
*******floor

When I do a character jump animation and foot hits “floor” which it assumes is the zero plane grid as there is no real way of defining this,

This is the how the bone reacts: The toes go through the floor, but the ankles remain on floor level exactly like so…

|

**/*****floor
|

It’s like it doesn’t understand that the toes are part of the foot or something.

Maya 2011 HIK is bugged.

#4

ha sorry…i think i was talking about fbik which ive used a lot and not hik which i havent really used yet…doh..

#5

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