Forward Instantaneous Kinematics

I remember animating with this using 3DS Max’s biped and it’s a really intuitive system as far as the animator’s concerned. I’ve been looking for a way to recreate it in Maya either using constraints or expressions (though I’m always open to any way of solving a problem). Unfortunately, I’ve been less than successful. Is there any sort of literature on this? Or something I can look up? Google’s not very helpful.

this had a long topic thread all ready, check it out http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1451&highlight=scriptjob see what you think.

Brad

Oh, thanks. I was lurking the boards around the time that topic was hot and somehow I completely missed it. That exotools thing you posted look like it has potential, and it’s good to know that selection-based operations can be done, at least through the C++ api. Also the HIK think could work but the implementation is really odd and the lack of realtime matching sort of kills it for me. I want to try setting up a proper rig with it before I make any judgement calls. I guess it goes without saying on this forum, but the goal is to make animation as seamless as possible so the animator can focus on performance rather than trying to get IK/FK to do what they want it to do.

HIK does have realtime matching, the rigs sync well in 2012, HIK was really early basic and a transition,

HIK rigs work by always allowing at anytime to swtich both how the animation interpolates during playback and also how you want to pose it, fk/ik, full body, just a single ctrl,

I have been moving away from having traditional ik/fk rigging for a while now, animators need a little reassurance at first but once they see what they can do with out having only an A/B choice they usually love it. Kind of a hand made HIK like rig in regards to pinning and interpolation.