Recently, I’ve learned that newer versions of Blender allow keyframing of IK constrained bones, for things like setting knees and elbows’ direction, or resolving the behavior of more than 2 bones’ IK chain. Does this mean that traditional helper objects for pole direction are obsolete? Or there are situations when they are still necessary? Personally, I do not like IK poles, as they clog the rig and tend to get “lost” in a scene. But I’d like to know what other animators think about it
Hi, i don’t know what you mean by lost in the scene they are normally parented to the root of the character or other bones? I use them all the time to adjust the rotation of the limbs.
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Pole targets are indispensable and an integral part of every major rigging system. Being able to keyframe IK bones is not a substitute for pole control
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I use elbow and knee targets constantly in 4.1.
But it’s worth noting that animation is not my strongest suit, so perhaps there is some new tool or workflow that you’re talking about that makes the end result easier to work with. But nothing about poles has been overly stressful.
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Maybe it is just me, but if a character is moved away from the origin or rotated for 90+ degrees, it becomes increasingly hard to tell which IK pole corresponds to which limb. I once tried to code an editor script that moves the IK poles close to their joints every time IK control bone is de-selected; do not remember what was the problem since I abandoned it. It interfered with some editor operation
Are you making custom rigs? Every solution I’ve tried (both Rigify and Autro Rig Pro) doesn’t have this problem, they use bone constraints, scripting, and bone colors to make it painless
I do not go as far as to want them removed. The whole topic came to my head after I downloaded a model by other CG artist who does animations quite regularily. The rig did not have poles. So it got me thinking: was it an error or a feature? Is abandoning poles bad workflow? and such
Unfortunately (?), I do prefer custom rigs
Tried bundled version of Rigify once and thought it was hideously overdesigned
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Okay, then that definitely contributes to the issue. It targets aren’t parented into the hierarchy in a good way, then I imagine it would be a problem if you start moving the torso or the root around.
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The best behavior for them would be just to snap to the fixed distance behind or before their joints, every time the rig is updated. But alas, it would require a script that I failed to make with my skill level
Seconded. I use Auto Rig Pro for animation daily and use pole targets daily
Any screen shots of how that works and are you sure the poles aren’t just hidden?
With what I know so far, I’m not sure how one would do animation without a pole target for the elbows and knees. I mean if you flip or spin the character around, it needs some way of knowing the direction they are pointing in, otherwise at any given frame you can hit a gimbal lock and have an arm or leg do an instant 180.
Going to have to disagree on that one. Been using Rigify more and more lately and have been finding it to be fairly powerful and flexible.
If anything, at a base level (for quality character animation), the default metarigs are more under-designed than anything.
But it is a modular system, so that can be ‘fixed’.
You can use other bones to show the connection so you know which is which
Just lock all their transforms and make them non-selectable from the outliner
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I was sure I unhid everything. But I’ll doublecheck once I’m back at Blender
Are there any tutorials about it that you’d recommend? All the info I managed to find was fragmentary
Looks like a plan, thanks
Yup, that’s easy: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdcL5aF8ZcJt1GvL-Fcxy-fPgEFG-1fLp
Along with various other videos on his channel, but that playlist should get you up to speed.
Then as a minor shameless plug, I have a couple of Rigify specific videos on my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@antgib but only one is a real quick beginner do/don’t list of what most people seem to mess up when just starting to play with it. While the other is very specific to eye rigging and likely not something one tends to mess with at the start.
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BTW, I’ve checked the character in question, and its IKs are entirely pole-less. Poles aren’t present after alt+h or on some hidden layer. I even animated a character turning around, using rotational keyframes of IK bones to set elbow/knee direction, and didn’t get any worse interpolation errors than would be in the rig that has poles
I’m not sure I would personally call that a quality rig, I can see a lot of issues with it and it would definitely benefit from pole targets
It needs more testing than 40 frames animation of course, so maybe it indeed breaks in some cases. But one use case where such approach is prefered, I think, would be IK chains with more than 2 bones (such as spines or tails), since they are ambiguous and even a pole cannot resolve them perfectly