I’ve been working with Blender 2.66a for about 2 weeks now trying to relearn the interface (I played with it before it went open-source/free way back when) and dived in with a character skin/mesh extracted from Mass Effect 3 (Unreal 3 engine). The import process broke pretty much all the connections and settings for the bones but after these 2 weeks, watching tutorials, and a lot of trial-and-error, I’ve gotten the armature/bones all set and working. I am having all kinds of problems, however, getting the IK process to work. I first submit this image:
With this image I’ve highlighted all the inverse kinematic bones/armatures. They all connect through the bone called “God” in the bone list. First, I tried activating the kinematics of one of the armatures - the two behind the mesh are called "ShoulderTwist.L.IK and ShoulderTwist.R.IK. I selected one of them and proceeded to apply constraints, associate it with the appropriate shoulder bone but the instant I completed the process, the entire mesh twists into a knotted mess and any attempt to move the IK bone sets it spinning like crazy and knotting up even worse. No matter what I try, no matter what settings I adjust for the bone or the IK, the IK is unusable.
So some questions…is this particular function/application of IK in Blender 2.66a broken? I watched a tutorial over the last few days on rigging a skeleton and it was using Blender 2.60 and the author indicated that there is a bug in Blender concerning the use of a separate bone through which all IKs function. In this case I presume that would be “God” bone that has all the IKs associated with via dashed line(?). I haven’t yet found a tutorial addressing this so I need to ask if this is salvageable? How do I go about getting these IKs working as intended?
I’ve made a few subtle alterations to the skin of the character and intend(ed) to re-import the skeleton back into the game and see what my changes wrought but I cannot even successfully export this to psk from Blender due to problems with the IK. Also, there’s no point in exporting it if I cannot get the bones working as the game expects.
Any aid or pointers would be greatly appreciated.