Skip to content

Tag: IK

Season 01 – Episode 30 – Finished Guiding Tool

Published by Raffaele on 4 April, 2018

Finished, Working Guiding Tool

This episode we come to a fully working, finished Guiding Tool capable of swapping guide/control graph states, as well as clean out DG and DAG items to completely remove the guide yielding a finished component ready to hand out.

Towards the very end we also go into how stretchy IK could be added to our leg component. We’ll probably do add it ourselves in the future, so if you’re after some homework it might not be a bad way to go, as you will eventually be able to compare your implementation with the stream’s.

Stretchy IK ending aside: This is honest work investigating the components, testing and extending the tool, and applying fixes as needed when the tool evidences some previously unaddressed issue in the leg component.

It’s a relaxed stream with an easy pace and I kinda like how it went; particularly the fact it came to a clean conclusion bang on time.

We’re now ready to move on to finishing the foot component to acknowledge the foot offset from FK/IK controls, and we have one minor fix left for the leg guide to properly preserve the offset connection with the hip, and then we’ll be good to export and symmetrize the leg and finally bind.
The fruit of all our efforts is finally in sight!

All code can be found on github labelled by the day, as usual.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Chill Session 01 – Clean Up episode 27 scene

Published by Raffaele on 17 March, 2018

Scene Clean Up betrween episodes 27 and 28

Clean Up Work between episodes 27 and 28.

Not much more than that to be said.
It’s the periodic clean up work before sharing a large scene I would normally do off stream, but decided to share this time.

I intentionally refrained from modifying or adding behavior to the components, that’s something I would do in an official stream, but you might still like it for a light listening/watching.

The important bit is the scene, which is now available in the resources page

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 21 – Kinesiology and Finished Guided Leg

Published by Raffaele on 5 March, 2018

Intro to Limb Kinesiology, Fixing the Foot, Finishing the Leg

If nothing else, make sure you at least watch the video from 45m and on for an introduction to Kinesiology.
The rest is a fairly clean and straight forward bit of nodelling that brings the whole leg back together and gets us a fully guided component

Not a lot to add to the above.
We take stock of the work we had left behind, “fix” the foot, clean some odd spots, and call it a day with a fully functioning guidable leg by the 45th minute.

Since there was time to spare, and a good question in chat, I decided to ramble on for another 15 minutes about the kinesiology of limbs and how it relates to twist and joint behavior, which hopefully you will find interesting.

Season 01 – Episode 20 – Leg Guide pt2

Published by Raffaele on 3 March, 2018

Finishing the Guide, Notes on Constraints

Like a few episodes ago I feel this episode, while still with a clear main theme of the Guide, needs an introduction.

I have, in the past, redone streams when I thought they weren’t up to par. In this case I decided not to (redo it), because I don’t feel it’s a “bad one”.
The first half is without hitches and we go about our business of analyzing where we stand, recapping, and setting things up.
Somewhere in the second half being indecisive about how to tackle the framing of the knee buffer, I chased my tail around a bit while looking at options, and on some fairly simple mistakes (largely involving the aim constraints).

The episode is still worth watching through, but it feels like I have been hand waving the graph cycle subject for too long so that the second part of the episode might be confusing to a good slice of the audience.

Lastly, at the very end, in the last few minutes before wrapping up, I explain something about containers (assets) in Maya, how they interact with the node editor, and why you might find that opening one of the scenes I share might show you a node editor with no connections despite the rig working fine.

So, with all that in mind I decided to do a special intro to explain how constrain cycles work, why they exist, what other cycles you might encounter and what their consequences are as well as how to solve them.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the episode,

Intro and Constraints

Episode 20

Season 01 – Episode 14 – Adding FK to IK Blending

Published by Raffaele on 15 February, 2018

Blending FK and IK in the leg component

I do mention this early in the stream, but just to re-iterate the point: If you watch videos as they come out you might be surprised to find episode 14 going live and no episode 13 up yet.

First: Don’t panic! You can watch this and it won’t be a problem to keep up if you’re up to 12. What we did in 13 is largely theory, which isn’t required for any other episode as it was pretty philosophical, and on the practical front we only fixed a few connections and names in the rig.
By downloading the scene from the resources page you can easily catch up to it, as well as dissect the fixed asst.

The reason it didn’t go up right away after I finished the stream is that it’s a subject I’m particularly fond of and I feel I need to either edit it, or at least release it with an intro and (possibly) an errata. I should be able to get to it during the coming weekend.

If you read/watch these a few days or more late you will have seen 13 up and all will be well.

Getting to the point though: This stream we added FK to the leg and showed how to trivially blend between FK and IK as well as discussed how we could cut down and compress the graph even further in the near future.
There isn’t really much in the way of required knowledge, but if you haven’t followed, or don’t remember, the theory from the Pilot Season episodes the Matrix Maths one is worth a watch as we do make use of matrix mult again.

Enjoy,