Automatic FK/IK switching in a Maya rig?

Rigging
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[QUOTE=bclark;9220]And last but not least-:slight_smile: (yes I could have just posted this in one post but what fun is that:)

There is http://area.autodesk.com/gdc/class1 on creating a no/cycle mulitway constraint system with built in nodes. I turned his example in to a self-contained maya asset that I can import in and connect up.

Or a more complete system http://exotools.net/ the orig. multi way constraint in Maya. *I am beta testing for and friends with them, full disclosure.[/QUOTE]

Hello,
the exoSwitch Constraint from exoTools is now in public beta. It can be downloaded from here:

http://exotools.net/ExoSwitchConstraint/PublicBeta/PublicBeta.html

You can see how the constraint can be user to create a quick ik/fk switching system here:

Cheers.

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sweet! Thanks

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Create a switchable IK/FK character rig in Maya

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I recently completed a scriptjob based switcher that creates and deletes constraints to get the FK and IK sections to match up. It works great except thereā€™s a few things to watch out for.

PROS:
Itā€™s surprisingly quick. Iā€™ve been rigging up this character and have noticed absolutely ZERO speed difference using a scriptnode listener.
Itā€™s automatic. The job takes over when the specified action happens. In my case, itā€™s tripping a specific attribute.
ITā€™S EASY! The animator doesnā€™t know whatā€™s happening. They just see it work and smile!
They donā€™t get run during batch render time and during command line rendering, so if you get an autokeying autoswitch, the preset keys take care of it all for you.

CONS:
If youā€™re building a switcher scriptjob, you need to account for keyframes.
The API lies. This isnā€™t neccesarily a con, but I noticed that no matter what I had set it to, the job launches when the frame is changed. You can fix that by building cancellers into the script with the undoInfo command.
Finally, thereā€™s the problem of multiple instancing and namespaces. When creating the script, I had to use object names for selections and stuff. THere might be a way to use a script node to edit another script node, turning absolute names into variables and then run it proper, but I havenā€™t looked into it yet.

Again, I cannot emphasize speed enough. Matter of fact, go open a new file and punch in scriptJob -lj; You will see that Maya itself uses it as sort of an event listener system.