I’m new to Blender and I love it I think the community is great and it’s amazing how much the software has advanced. I’m working at an animation studio and I will be in charge of rigging and animating a couple of characters. I looked through the storyboards of the project we’re making and we need characters whose arms can switch between IK and FK. I can rig a full biped character with no problems, but it can either be only IK or only FK.
Can somebody explain to me how to setup the arm rig so that I can switch from FK to IK and viceversa, it’s ok if its not a seamless transition, I can work with that.
I’ve been looking everywhere but I can’t find any tutorials that explain thoroughly, we are using Blender 2.49
I’m not sure how much help this will be for you… I learned this stuff when I made a rig then forgot it by the time I needed to make another rig. So I played around with a arm rig I had, and added instructions in a text window to remind myself how to make switches. This file is only for my own reference, but I’m sharing it in hopes it helps you.
@randy
I highly recommend not setting up an IK switch by turning off the IK solver itself. It can cause big problems, since the IK solver cannot be ‘visually keyed’ and there is no way to correct any rotational problems that occur.
The way I learned when I first started, and continue to use, is a variation on what waylow has presented. First create a single connected FK bone chain, and a duplicate IK bone chain (with the hand bone unparented). Then use a duplicate bone as the IK target for the arm, and parent that to the IK hand bone. All the FK bones have copy rotation constraints to the IK bones, and switching between FK and IK is just a matter of turning off the influence of the copy rotation constraints (which in 2.4x can all share the same IPO datablock, not sure about 2.5 yet).
I’ve attached an example I just made in 2.49b. It should also work in alpha 0 (except the hand needs to be reconfigured). It doesn’t work in alpha 1 for some reason… I think there have been major changes to the driver system.
@FGC: Huh, I didn’t know that. Seriously, I didn’t. I’ve rigged a character that way, but animated it in IK and never switched to FK, never used visual loc keys (on the character). I can see how you would have rot problems while switching from IK to FK.
I looked at both setups and I probably at some point in the animation process Ill have the character switch from IK to FK, so I had to go for FGC and waylow’s method! Thanks to you too revolt_randy!
