Setting up Human IK in Maya 2012 pt12 Control Rig Overview

Give a basic overview of using the HIK controls.

[mrcead]

Finally! A complete how to rig and weight tutorial that is clear, complete and easy to follow. Sir, I thank you. My static T-posed models also thank you.

[LHKRacing]

Thank you! Great Tut.
Rigging, Skinning and Control Rigs used to confuse the hell out of me!
This series cleared a lot up.
Human IK rules!!!! 1-Click Control Rigs!!!! Love it!!!
Thanks Again.

[capgamer]

Great tutorial, very simple once you have it understood but it is completely alien at first glance. Thank you so much!

[vinnyargentina]

Thanks Matt! You can reset single controls or body parts to the default pose by zeroing out the rotation on the FK control(s). The one trick to this is you have to make sure that no joints that will be affected by the change have Reach turned on. So for example, to 0 out a knee, turn off ReachT & R on the ankle, select the "shin" FK and 0 out the rotations. To 0 out the whole leg, select the "thigh", Edit-Select Hierarchy, then 0 the rots. They may not all go to exactly 0 but will go to default.

[ArlidarMusic]

Very few such detailed and good video, thanks for your work.

[CardboardDojo]

ive watched the whole ik tutorial and i can say its a life saver!

[vinnyargentina]

Thanks Mauricio. Check:
1.Make sure ReachTran and ReachRot are set to follow the controls you intend for the ankle (or whatever joint)
2.Check to see if the chain can't achieve the attempted position along the path at some point
3.Check if rotations are in Euler or Quaternion - they are quaternion by default with HIK and that tends to help eliminate odd twisting since interpolation always follows the shortest path. If Euler, maybe try Quaternion.
4.Is it trying to move in a way a human couldn't

[vinnyargentina]

Really sorry about the lag on my response! To me, a blend shape driven facial setup is one of the easiest to setup and animate. You won't have quite as much control as a cluster or joint driven face, but you can definitely create very effective expressions relatively simply. You can also control a blendshape driven face (at least to get a quick start) with Motionbuilder using either mocap or a voice. I haven't actually used it, but I'd check out Brekel Kinect Pro Face - it looks really sweet!

[mashvillekim]

Thanks for the series..very helpful indeed. Cheers man

[reseteo]

Muchisimas gracias por todo el tutorial estan fantasticos, geniales de verdad es uno de los mejores tutoriales de rigging que e visto... Saludos desde Colombia.

[vinnyargentina]

NP, glad to try to help. Hotfixes work on student version, and if you just google "maya hotfix" you should find them. The car paint material should work just fine. Try reassigning one material to the whole object and see if anything disappears when you add a keyframe. If that works, add materials to faces as needed 1 by 1 to see where the problem appears. Reassigning materials may fix it, who knows. I'd still get the hotfix though.

[DoodMan]

Alrighty!
I will try both the hotfixes and the reassigning materials, hopefully the hotfix takes care of it tho. You're the man! ;)

[vinnyargentina]

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you've got going on, but you can rotate the arm to be pretty close to parallel with the X axis and HIK will be fine with it - it doesn't care about the actual rotation values. If you want it to be exactly parallel with no rotation you could unbind, snap joints to the grid or an object that's parallel to the world x, then freeze, orient joints, rebind, etc. But you don't need to do that unless you just want to. Let me know if that's not what you were asking.

[Regna]

Great tuts best rigging and skinning ones ive seen, Although i am having an issue, my stance pose, its some random pose i made when i was testing my binds how do i set it to a t pose so it stays that way ?

[LUKEFLANAGANdotORG]

Really great series! Any suggestions on the most efficient (or easiest) way to add a basic face rig to a HIK controlled body (with mocap from motion builder)? Emotion/expression is needed, but no dialogue for this character. Cheers!

[vinnyargentina]

Thanks and glad to hear it! That's a really odd bug...so if there are no keys on the rig, it renders fine, but if there are keys, parts disappear? I've never seen that one, but I'll try to suggest some things to look at. Are parts of your mesh parented to the rig, or is the mesh all bound? If parented, try binding or parenting/constraining them to the bound skeleton. Make sure you have the latest hotfix for Maya. Other reasons parts wouldn't render I can think of don't make sense for this.

[vinnyargentina]

I can get it to you if you feel you really need it, but the methods I go over can be easily applied to any mesh - & this is just a basic mesh from a modeling demo anyway. If you just need *a mesh to follow along with, Maya ships with a few that you can grab Window-General Editors-Visor then HumanIK Examples tab. You can delete all history and use one of those, plus you can then compare the quality of your weighting to the original example to see what you improved, or could do better.

[jmettam]

Thanks for replying. I'm using Maya 2013 and I couldn't see any hotfixes for it 'yet', but there were 2 service packs that maybe I should instal.

[bradleyallennewman]

Nice tut. Any tips on using the curve editor with HumanIK? From what I can tell it seems like editing translation curves is straightforward but rotation curves aren't really editable due to the fact they are quaternions instead of euler. Are you supposed to just edit rotation in the viewport with the rotation manipulator and not touch the quaternion rotation curves or is there a way to edit Euler curves?

[mat_f]

Hello, first thanks for this awesome tutorial!!It's really helping me out with the animation.
Then, i want to ask you one question:
If i want to add extra bones to my HIK rig (like eyes or mouth) how i can do it?
Because every time i add an extra bone and then reload the scene (.mb file) i find my HIK all messed up (joints everywhere).
Thanks for the answer and for this great tutorial series!