Ok, so I made a rig that I thought was going to work fine. The rig itself looks right, but while doing animations, it becomes clear that the rig is twisting the wrist quite a bit. I’ll try to explain the screenshot below. (Blender 2.49b)
The Hand is 2 bones (Basically ignore the fingers and the bone that is perpendicular to the rest of the hand) The larger blue one is the IK controller and the smaller green one is the deformation bone, that copies the loc/rot of the IK bone. I did this so that the deformation bone could be connected to the arm, as it is not a conflict of IK/parent being in the same chain. The Hand IK goes up the forearm all the way to the shoulder.
The only real problem is the wrist. When I rotate the Hand IK bone, it rotates only the hand deformation bone, not the forearm and up. This means that even in a simple pose like in this screenshot, the wrist gets twisted up like a crushed soda can. I have tried several combinations of copying the rotation, with all sorts of influences. I’ve also tried limiting the rotation, based on the deformation bone… but I can’t seem to get it to work right without messing up the elbow too. If the forearm does follow the wrist, it just makes it not line up with the upper arm, so basically it just pushes the problem up the chain.
If anyone can give me some pointers on how I could go about fixing this problem, it would be much appreciated!
Also, I tried a lot of things including the copy rotation and changing the influence. I’m also looking for something that will work outside of blender. I export to UDK and I know some things don’t like to export properly.