I’ve been working on making two different personal rigs for the last little bit. Taking my time and testing and playing around with different things. This particular one I’ve been testing things on will be a kind of hybrid drawing swap and deformer rig. What I was trying to play around with was an IK/FK switch.
I originally learned rigging in Maya many moons ago and have gone back into it to freshen up my skills and see if I can pull harmony rigging inspiration for things I had on my Maya rigs. I’ve come up with a couple of different things I want to try and build, but this one I wanted to start with being able to create a switch that would let you go from IK to FK and back.
Now, while I’m happy with how it is functioning, here are some of the issues that came up, how I fixed them and a few things that are still unresolved.
I was trying to prevent the node view from being the size of a football field so I wanted to have one set of drawings that would switch from one peg set to another. I managed to get that to work with a combination of transformation gates, image switches, and constraint switches. So basically I had one set of drawings, then the base peg for that drawing went into a transformation gate and split off. One to its IK set up, one to its FK set up. These were then controlled by a constraint switch that I also hooked up to an image switch to hide and show the IK handles.
While this does the job….the cables are chaotic and some things still don’t function exactly how I want.
For example, if you deform the lower leg to smooth out the knee shape, that deformation is below the transformation gate, so that deformation stays on the leg no matter if it is in IK or FK mode. So really, what I ended up with is creating two overlapping systems all tangled by transformation switches.
I have cleaned up the view quite a bit since…basically creating a closed group of the drawings and then having them come out to a backdrop of an IK setup and an FK set up but it’s still pretty hard to navigate.
I’m thinking I might explore actually having the two full systems so it’s easier for the animators to read and find a way to show one and hide the other. I know this can be easily done by posing everything out in the timeline and creating master controllers, but I’m always curious about ways to do the same thing without one.
For example, I always like to set up my rigs with a drawn handle connected to a peg to control the pupils rather than posting out the pupils, making a master controller, and having it blend between….when I can just give the animators a handle in under a minute to do the same thing.
If anyone wants to see what I mean about a pupil handle, let me know and maybe I can make a quick post about it.