An update for any interested - While I haven’t kicked HumanIK completed out of my pipeline, I’m leaning towards relegating it to optional / retargettting only. I just used it succesfully for a set of prototype characters, but a new character I pulled together is having a completely new issue. This new character has some more elaborate attachments that the previous character and for whatever reason after 3 - 4 keyframes the constraints I’ve used break for one of the attachments. I can save, reload reference etc. with not issue - but once I start skinning and throw some test keyframes down for skinning positions one of the rig extensions loses its contstraint connection and proceeds to float. (can see “disconnectAttr” in the referenced file changelist) The other extension using an identical set up are fine, and the previous character set using the same set-up is fine, but this one breaks consistently.
It’s enough to have me abandon using it entirely - but I’m in a phase where we’re throwing together lots of rigs for test characters and wanting to share motion block outs readily. I have no way to predict if a character is going to be kept or heavily iterated on - and since I got the hang of hand keying with Full Body IK I was jazzed that it would be low effort to share those animations. My next course of action is to try the flow for customizing auto-rig templates to HIK characterization as needed and testing the time investment (and more importantly the functionality) and going from there.