[Maya] Human IK experience

Elie

Hey all,
I'm testing out these days the human IK from Maya. I never had the occasion to use it, before. I have little experience with other rigs, though.
Best thing is you can copy/paste animations to an other rig.

But: I didn't find a footroll, which is very annoying for me, do you have the same problem folks?

By the way, I had some bugs in my scene with the tangents and weird curves in the graph editor, and no scapula controls? I mean, come on, how in the world can you animate this?

Do you customize it? Have you been able to add joints for special characters (you know, those with hats, bags, accessories hanging...)?

Elie

Also, did you have bad surprises with two-handed weapons? I could parent constrain the main hand to the prop, but couldn't constrain the prop to lead the other Ik following hand.

Hito

HIK is mediocre at best. But it's really the only built-in tool that can easily handle MoCap. General consensus dealing with extensive MoCap data is go MotionBuilder or go broke.

Foot rolls and the like I believe are handled by Aux Pivots. Never really used those myself.

In order to constraint HIK controllers to other objects in the scene or other HIK controllers you need to add an AUX Affector. It looks like magenta object same shape as the controller. You can constraint this to another object in the scene, and key the weight of the HIK controller to the Aux affector. It acts similar as a go-between locator/transform in more standard Maya rig setups. All kind of extra fiddly IIRC.

As far as animation curves go, it maybe because your prefs set HIK to something other than Independent Euler. Check the preferences and set it to Independent Euler if necessary.

Pretty sure additional joints can just be inserted into the hierarchy without much trouble, you'd need to animate those joints directly or add custom rigging. As long as the custom rigging depend on HIK controllers and not the other way around it's probably okay. If you are inclined you can add Aux affectors to all the HIK controllers then use those to hook HIK to your own custom rigging... but then you might as well custom rig from the ground up.

Mark Dygert

Yeah... HumanIK isn't really meant to be used to animate with, unless you're extremely desperate and your needs are bare bones basic. It's strength, if you can call it that is in retargeting animations from one rig/skeleton to another. 

If you're going to do any kind of animation, I suggest you create a custom rig. Advance Skeleton is a great tool that takes the headache out of rigging.

Elie

Thanks a lot for your comments, I'll keep testing that!