I’m at loose ends here. Fiddling around with the bone rotation does nothing. Adding a pole target elimates the knee joint altogether, and so does using the Limit X option.
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Couple of things I notice - 1st I’m thinking you have a bone roll issue in that I don’t think all the bones in the legs/feet are rolled correctly. If you have not constraints on the legs, pose one leg, then use the copy/paste flipped pose functions you would probably end up with some strange results. In my free character, Joe, all the bones in both legs have their z-axis pointing forwards and it functions fine. (ps, you can find joe thru the link in my sig…)
2nd thing is it’s best and standard practice to create bones that will have ik constraints on them with a small amount of ‘pre-bend’ so the ik constraint knows which way to bend them. Then also the pole target helps out as well. Even if you have the model weight painted to the armature, you should be able to go into edit mode for the armature, adjust bone roll angles and give the knee a bit of pre-bend without effect the mesh. Don’t move the bones to give the pre-bend, just move the joint where upper leg and lower leg connect.
Additionally, here is a video tutorial I did on fk/ik arm setup, it shows the pre-bend I speak of and also the use of the pole target and adjusting the pole angle to give the desired results.
Randy
Thank you for posting the video, I had completely overlooked the pole offset option. Everything seems okay now that I’ve given it a rotation.
Thank you! even as an old post it still help me a lot!