Friday 17 October 2014

IK Handles

There are multiple different types of IK handles them being Single Chain (SC), Rotate plane (RP) handle and Spline handle. For this project I will be using at least 2 of the different handles them being the SC and RP handles. But I will also be looking into spline handles to see where I can fit them into my project or were I could fix them into a future project.

Single chain (SC) and Rotate plan (RP) are used to animate motion into limbs and other objects.  Single chain IKs control the middle of joints when rotating the IK handle. Rotate plane IKs are used to rotate the joint chain/system they are connected too and can work with the Single chain to make a limb move realistically. For Example I will be using a Rotate plane handle from the hip to the ankle then have Single chain handles from the ankle to the ball of the foot and from the ball of the foot to the toes. Having this IK handles where I put them make the rig have similar muscles to a real biped or quadruped.

For my biped I will be using a combination of Single chain and Rotate plane IKs to animate the legs. Using this combination in the past has worked really well when it came to animating it later on it gave me just the right amount of freedom to be able to do walk cycles, jumps and other actions using the legs. But also when added with set driven keys it made the animations feel more real and more professional.

For my shark I didn’t think about adding any IK handles to this rig because I didn’t fully know it would be affective enough for it to be worth adding them. It seemed at the time that moving the rig with controllers gave the model decent movement even though it was a bit time consuming.

For my quadrupeds each leg will have a similar to the biped but slightly different because of the way dogs legs are the basics of it will be the same just the pivot on the Rotate plane will be slightly. A dogs leg in this case is slightly curved which is why the IK handles might be a little bit different but they should work the same way they would in a biped. Adding set driven keys later on will help more with the animation side of this but I will talk about that later.


When looking up about the Spline IK handle I found out that they are somewhat similar to the rotate plane IK in the way you attach them to a rig/ joint system but they are used more to create the motion of curvy or twisty shapes. Finding this out after finishing doing my shark model was a bit disappointing because I could of used that to create a much better rig and make a more realistic movement. I also could have used the spline in the dog’s tail so that when it wagged it did more of a wavy motion. Both the human and the dog could have slightly been improved by adding a spline to the spine and by adding a curve to the spine. Because when doing a joint chain/system the joints work better when they are in a straight line than to when they are dotted around everywhere.

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