Arm Rig!

asjo07 · Jan 2011

Hi guys!

I'm fairly new to the world of rigging and animating, and I'm just wondering what type of game rig for a standard human arm would you guys prefer?

I kinda figure that Inverse Kinematics is the way to go, but I cant really seem to get it down right.. If I do a rotary plane, I can't get the arm to rotate at all! If I on the other hand do the single chain I get a pretty good result, only the forearm cannot rotate on its own.. which is quite annoying and I figure it would only be a bigger pain when I start animating..?

So does anybody have any suggestions?

Mark Dygert · Jan 2011

Typically you create two systems, a IK rig, and a FK rig then blend between the two systems. Very few rigs work only with one set of joints to manipulate. I can only think of Biped in 3dsmax and a Maya rig that Naughty Dog created which actually has 3 rigs (IK/FK/Resulting) but you only ever interact with the resulting skeleton just like you would Biped, but biped uses some crazy quaternion dark arts to only have one set of joints... it's great but weird at times...

asjo07 · Jan 2011

Hmm I see, It does make some kind of sense that you would need more than one system!... Do you happen to know any good tutorials that goes through this process in maya?.. I've searched the web a lot and sad through a ton of tuts but they all seem to go about this part very superficially and most of them pretty much uses a simple rig setup.. I suspect its more or less just to make the case, rather than actually make it functional!...

Thank you for the reply..

asjo07 · Jan 2011

Okay, so I searched google one more time, however this time including the words FK & IK and what do you know.. I found the first 4 or 5 rigging tutorials with switchable IK FK rigs..

.. I guess sometimes it helps just to know what you searching for..

Anyway, I'll start checking those out right away.. Again, thanks for your help!

oh, and btw, if you (or somebody else) do know a particularly fantastic tut, please do share..

r_fletch_r · Jan 2011

post dem links! that'll help the next person doing a search

asjo07 · Jan 2011

r_fletch_r wrote: »

post dem links! that'll help the next person doing a search

You are so absolutely right!

So Here is what I found, but Keep in mind I haven't looked them through myself yet, so I can't vouch for their quality personally

http://seithcg.com/wordpress/?page_id=30
This one is from SeithCG.com and it deals with seamless FK/IK Rigging.. It seams like there is some pretty heavy mel scripting in this... but again I haven't read It and I have very little mel-scripting experience so I don't know how straight forward it is..

http://www.jawa9000.com/Technical/fk-ik-arm/fk-ik-arm.htm
This Tut from Jawa9000.com seems to do the very same thing only without the use of mel-scripting.. Instead it uses driven keys!

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/30497-IK-FK-arm-switch-in-Maya-for-importing-into-Unity
This here is not so much a tut as it is a discussion.. I found this on the unity3d forum, which may or may not interest you in regards to this..

http://vimeo.com/12614605
http://vimeo.com/12976426
These two links are especially nice I think, its a video tut of what seems to be exactly the same thing as the first two links are doing... Here they are using the same process as Jawa9000.com, so driven keys rather than mel-scripting..

anyway.. I'll get to it, and I hope this helps somebody!..

Arm Rig!

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