Transcription - Rigging AND Skinning Done

Yep. I was so close to having both done within a day and a half, but due to some complications, I had to go back and edit a few mistakes, but now, after about two days worth of working, I have a ready to animate bear. He's still missing his fur though, but that's for another day!

On the last group project, we had seven characters. All of them rigged by Shahbir, and, I think it was three of them had IK - FK switching arm rigs built into them.

Anyway, I wanted my bear to get the same treatment, so I had a go myself. I had a rough idea of how it worked, but wasn't sure about any of the little problems that I might encounter.
So I had a go... and... it worked! Basically the technique was to rig an IK arm on one set of joints, and an FK on another. Then constrain the main joints to both the IK and FK joints. Then create an attribute to switch between them.

Here is what the rig setup looks like in FK...


...and IK.


The skeleton


I've also made a video demonstrating nearly all the controls on the rig.




Notice the pole vector controls. They actually point to the IKs they effect. It's a remarkably simple little touch I added to the rigs. Just use an aim constraint.

With this new rig I thought I better test it with a pose.


Next on my list of things to do is set and prop modelling, while starting to animate, or at least work out in rough how the shots are going to work.

A Flock of Pixels