Hi,
I am pretty new with rigging, so I guess is a simple mistake, but I´ve been wandering for a while with this little problem and I can still not find how to fix it. I am rigging a human figure and I am having problems with the IK direction when parenting it to a control. It is, to be precise, the control for rotating the heels. It works fine (goes up and down, rotates and so on) until I parent it to the control of the heel (I am following a tutorial, so it is a standard way of doing it, moving the pivot of the control to the center of the joint and then parenting the IK handle to the control). When I parent, it doesn´t rotate in Y, so I guess it is a problem about the direction of the joints or the IK… I rebuilt the legs taking care of the direction and tried to set a preferred angle (without the IKs), but still is not working.
Any suggestions?
IK in the wrong direction
Could you post a screenshot of your setup (with the outliner open)?
It sounds like you need another IK handle from the ankle to the ball of the foot.
I’m assuming that at this point you have one rotation plane IK setup from the hip to the ankle, which would explain why you are not getting any rotation on the Y-axis. To get this rotation you would need an extra IK setup from the ankle to the ball (or toe depending on your setup) and make sure that both IK handles are parented under you control object.
I attached a screenshot of the general concept to this post. Sorry for the messiness, I’m doing this from the train on my laptop.
Anyways, let me know if this clears things up.
Thank you very much for your reply. I re-did the process a third time and now it is working (to be honest, I don´t know what was different this time). I have three IK handles on each leg (for the knee, ankle and foot). However, I am still having problems with the legs, now I am trying to add a pole vector and it´s not working. I´ve been trying to find a reason, I´ve read this could be because the legs skeleton is an ‘A’ instead of a straight line… however I re-did it as a `T’ and it didn´t worked either. I am also wondering how does it works when you have to do a rig on that position… I would like to know how to reorient the joints, because I think I will need to do that once in a while in the future… the orient joint tool has no effect (or I least, nothing I can see)… I am attaching you a couple of images as well as the outliner, so maybe you could give me a clue… thanks!
](http://s1313.photobucket.com/user/Irene_Lema/media/pic02_zps0fe40703.jpg.html)[/IMG]
](http://s1313.photobucket.com/user/Irene_Lema/media/pic03_zpsb9f2d3f6.jpg.html)[/IMG]
To get the best results, you should setup your joints to be planar with the yz plane. Also offset your pole vector controller from the knee to reduce the risk of flipping. When you setup the pole vector select the control object then the hip IK.
Joint orient does not visually change anything with your joints. It changes the local rotation axis which determines how the joint will rotate in relation to the world. If you want to manually change it you can enter component mode (f8) and select the question mark icon on the status line.
It looks like you are off to a good start. I would just straiten up those leg joints and offset the pole vector controls. If you get completely lost you can check this video out: RigHelper
It deals with a script I wrote, but covers some fundamentals of rigging a biped.
Good luck! Let me know if this is making sense.
Thanks again for your reply. I showed the character to someone else´s yesterday and also suggested to straighten up the legs… which I did (from the model and then the rig) with no results. Now I know a bit better how it works and I can tell you there´s something wrong with the ankle. The planes change there. That means, it bends in the right way when using the translation, but not in the rotation (when I add the control, i goes the wrong way or doesn´t work). That´s why the heel rotation wasn´t working last time (actually, yet isn´t, what happened is that I made the kneeIk a child instead of the ankle IK, without realizing it). I moved the pole vector control a little bit forward and now it works sometimes, but not the way it should (in strange directions and shy movements). I changed the joint orientation manually, using the Local Rotation Axis, but the results aren´t really good (I mean, now the pole vector works better and the heel control is moving the right joint, but the directions are very unaccurate)… I guess I did something wrong… I just followed this steps: http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2013/en_us/index.html?url=files/Skeleton__Orient_Joint.htm,topicNumber=d30e311601,hash=GUID-FB323E60-9280-41BF-B917-E38808C780D5 Is there a better way for doing it or maybe another suggestions?
Cheers!
The default settings for Maya’s joint orient tool should do the trick. Open the tool up, reset settings, select the root joint, and give it a whirl.
To see if it worked, turn on local rotation axis on your joints (select joints, Display -> Transform Display -> Local Rotation Axis) and inspect. It should look something like the pic attached to this post.
Great, it finally worked! and now I know much better how all that works. Thank you very much for your help!
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