Hello, I am having trouble getting my character’s leg to move correctly. The shin bone and the thigh bone move the wrong way whenever I try to bend the knee. I put the blend file at http://home.regent.edu/danibak/character.blend. Can anyone tell me why this is happening?
i think your problem is that the two leg bones
is too straight
go to edit mode and push the knee joint to front a little
then your leg will move correctly
moh taia’s solution will work if you turn off all the IK limits on the left leg and get rid of the 0.300 stiffness value . Right now if you just do that and the left leg will still misbehave (and also recalculate the bone roll angles of all your bones - see below)
Actually if you are going to use IK limits at all you should just lock both the Y and Z axes all together and limit the rotation of the X axis to a negative value (no positive) to around -120 . The knee joint is really a hinge . And also go into Edit Mode, select all bones and Ctrl-N (recalculate bone roll angles) . Otherwise the leg and probably other parts wont behave right if you decide to limit/lock IK axes .
It looks like you made both the armature and mesh in the front view because right now in Object Mode both are at 90 degrees to the Z axis . So what ever you do do not accidentally Ctrl-A (apply scale and rotation) otherwise you might wind up re-assigning vertex groups again …
But for optimum control you really need to add targets for the thigh bones and add a IK Solver to the thighs with a chain length of 1 (so that it only moves the thighs) for a more predictable result . Because with the above set up you have no control of where the knees will point to (he will look pigeon toed, or if you like it that way you can make him even more pigeon toed with the targets :)) and you might also think of doing the same for the elbows too .
Interesting spine set up you have there :yes: