IK in Animations Question

gooHero

Hey guys,

Happy New Years!

I have a question regarding IK in animations which has been bothering and hindering me; effectively ruining many of my scenes.

I have a script for humanoid characters (Limb Stick) and that works great for genesis 8 and 9, if you want to move for example the upper body only in one spot.

When I add manual IK to both humanoids and animals, it doesn't work so well though, and everything just jumps all over the place, effectively demolishing all the work done setting up a scene and the pose is often fudged until you reload the scene.

One example being: I create a "Null" and move that "Null" as close as possible to the middle of a "Hoof" on the Daz Horse 3. I then create an IK chain, set the "Chain Root" as the "Humerus"(shoulder), and the "Chain End" on the "Hoof" I then parent the "IK Chain" to the "Null" I created earlier. I activate "Pin Rotation/Translation" and set "Reach Rotation/Translation" to 100%. Only after that is done for all four legs, I start animating. Last time I had a scene open, it worked fine, and the animation played like I wanted it to. I opened it yesterday and the hooves were flying all over the place, pose ruined, scene ruined (until I reload it and do not click play). I did not forget to save, it looks as it should when I open the scene, but once I press play to check the animation it goes haywire real fast.

When I see animations from Blender, Unreal and pretty much any other engine, they are able to permanently fasten the limbs to a surface properly. In Daz, without doing the above, it looks horrendous because of the TCB calculations, and you get a very obvious swaying motion to go along with it. If you use Linear, it's much more tame and without variation, but still with a smidge of unwanted swaying.

Am I attaching the IK chains wrong? (The limbs are not stretched beyond their capabilities and they are unlocked (bend, side to side and twist)

Is there a script available for every limb imaginable, or is that not doable because of the differing bone structures? (I guess you would have to define the whole bone structure for it to work right?)

Could I change the script in "Limb Stick" to accomodate both monsters from out of the genesis sphere, animals and other, imported, characters?

 

regards,

anti

benniewoodell

You're not doing anything wrong, IK in Daz does not work the same as every other program and it's incredibly annoying. Every new update in Daz, I try and make an IK chain and handkey a simple walk cycle just to see if things are fixed, and nothing ever works right. I've been animating almost exclusively in Blender now because of this and just stick to Daz for close ups of talking where I use a facial mocap program for the dialogue, but actually moving a character, I just have grown too sick and tired of trying to make Daz do something that it should be able to but can't. What you could do is bring a character into blender through diffeo and set up the simple IK rig, or just the regular import rig for a horse as I did that recently for a project. You can bake the keyframes and bring the keyframes back into Daz as a pose preset and have IK that way if you want to render in Iray, but the feet still will slide ever so slightly which you can hide pretty easily and such. 

Wish I had better news on how to fix it.