Zeth Willie posts a three part look at creating IK to FK snapping in a Maya rig. Typically an IK/FK switching solution will incorporate multiple joint chains, and it is important to have some sort of mechanism that will be able to in effect “snap” the joint chain in use to another joint chain that will take over from that point on.
…the basics of setting up an IK/FK snapping script that will correctly position your IK control and pole vector based on the rotations of your FK arm. A little bit of math, some elbow grease and a winning attitude are you need! And some python scripting. And some secret nodes. And a bunch of other stuff too…
The last thing you want is to animate an arm in IK, and then needing to switch to FK and having the character’s arm not be in the last position that you have set a key for. And that what this tutorial series is all about, not so much the “switching” but the “snapping” component. Zeth covers pretty much everything in this regard starting with the basics of setting up an IK/FK snapping script, writing a script in Python, and adding some functionality to the script.
Check out Zeth’s post for IK to FK Snapping in Maya here.
- Part 1 – covers the basics of what it is, why we’d bother and some basics of vector math that we’ll need.
- Part 2 – covers the hows and whys of writing the basic version of the python script.
- Part 3 – covers using funky, cool message attributes to enhance the functionality of the script, etc.
