IK solver question

Support Basics & Interface
1

Just before I set out the question, I wanted to say a massive thankyou for whoever made the IK solver video tutorial - after a couple of minutes I understood something thats been bugging me for 2 years.

Here’s the question. I’m making a little animation of a character which has cartoon-like wings. I’m trying to make an animation of the wings flapping. The way I’ve gone about it is to make a mesh for the wings, parent them to an armature and I’ve added an empty at the tip of the wings which I then parented to the last bone on the armature… and set up the IK solver constraint.

The outcome works really nicely - ie I move the empty and the the wings follow.

The problem is this…

I want to make it so that when the wings are raised, the tips of the wings are flexed toward the body of the character and when they are lowered they flex in the opposite direction.

When I mess around with the empty I can get the wings to look exactly how I want them to. However, when I keyframe (I’ve tried loc and loc/rot/size) this pose, the wings flip into a different shape.

Is there any solution for this using the IK method?

Hope this makes sense

(…its all related to custard pies)

2

The drawback to using FK is just that… the computer interpolates things and doesn’t always get it quite right, so you have to spend a lot of time tweaking it.

If you haven’t already, select your armature, Tab into Edit Mode, select all, and press Ctrl-N (recalculate bone roll angles). If that doesn’t fix your problem, you might want to take a look at actions.

An action would allow you to cause the movement of one bone (say the wing/shoulder bone) to determine the movement of one or more other bones (the wing tips).

Search for nozzy’s rig for an example of using action constraints.

3

thanks Duoas. That was very helpful.