What the heck is HIK anyway?

LSchock - thanks for the feedback. you are right in that not everything has been ported... the "sticky handles" would be nice but are not in Maya yet.

blade33ru - I prefer to animate hands with a set driven key or a pose workflow that is independent from HIK. You do not have to use the finger effectors that are part of HIK as they can be very hard to work with.

Thanks a lot for your reply!

@ADL3: in Motionbuilder I would know how to do it, but I don't think they've ported all goodies from Motionbuilder over, but you can try:

in general there are two ways - you can add auxPivots to the AnkleEffector and place them onto the heel, ball. Then add another to the FootEffector and place it to the toe - but this way you always need to watch out which effector is turned on and which reach-settings you have.

The slicker way to do it is using Motionbuilder's sticky handles (which they probably haven't ported into Maya yet, but you might be able to do the same thing in Maya a bit differently):
you add a dummy object to the heel, ball and toe tip. Then you add sticky-handles to these dummies. In the handle settings, set them to manipulate around handle and in the manipulate-object field add:
on the toe: AnkleEffector + FootEffector (Ball)

on the ball: Ankle Effector (while setting the Pinning in the FootEffector to TR so the toes stay in place when you turn the ball dummy)

on the heel: same as on the ball

---
it depends on your workflow - if you want perfect control in the Graph Editor you might want to use effectors, because then e.g. you can say the heel is the active driving Effector and your inbetween will be interpolated between keys on the heel e.g. to stay on the spot and really rotate around the heel - the disadvantage is that you need to make sure you have turned off the reach on the other effectors and that you have linear or stepped tangents on the reach, etc...

I started with above method, having perfect Graphs, but now I just do pose to pose and fix the foot jitter frame by frame - it's faster this way for me.

probably best is to use a combination - e.g. you could use AuxEffectors on heel and ball and sticky handle on the toe....

good luck :)

if you figure out how to do this with Maya handles please post it here - thanks :)

HI!
The Great post ever!
I have a little problem: i try to add a footrool setup to HumanIK skeleton but with bad results...does anyone know the exact procedure?
Thanks!!!

great vids...im interested Steve, what is the process for hand animation or hand poses in fbik or HIK...im still using
2009 and have been using set driven keys on the fk skeleton which seems proabbly a bad idea, but i tend to get weird behaviour when i ´solve fingers´...is there a preferrd workflow for creatin and reusing hand poses? could i trigger TRAX hand poses from set drivern key maybe?

Hi Steven! yes, I saw the GDC demos. Can't wait for the 1 click interopt with HIK rig. I'm using mo-cap with motionbuilder at the momment and with 2011 the HIK rig looses its functionality when I import back to maya from MB.

Thanks for getting back to me :) 2012 releases ftw.

vfxforge - honestly FBIK was never really designed to work with anim layers :(

Aside from that... the news that I was referring to in an earlier comment is out now. As of Maya 2012 FBIK will be officially retired. All of the keyframing functionality that worked with FBIK has been integrated into the HIK rig. So the marking menus for setting key and pose modes, as well as the key/curve filtering in the graphEditor and timeline now work with HIK.

Going forward HIK will be unified between Maya and MotionBuilder. The same solver and the same UI are used for both in the 2012 releases. This is true with middleware as well in terms of the solvers. So everything in this post refers to pre-2012 releases.

The problem I am having when adding the effectors to a new overide animation layer is my main skeleton doesnt seem to follow the FBIK skeleton.

Hi Steven, sorry to bother you but I'm having problems with using fbik with animation layers.

What nodes specifically should I be adding to a animation layer ( overide ) ?

Looks like Santa is coming to town! can't wait to see what you guys come up with.

Hi Steven,

awesome, thanks :D
Looking forward to the GDC2011 lectures and announcements.

Cheers,
Leander.

Hi LSchock -

Stay tuned... I will have a lot more to say about this in a few days.

Hi,
thanks for the greeat demo videos. I've been using Maya, HIK and Motionbuilder and here some questions about the MB workflow within Maya 2011:

Does the new HIK (or even fbik) have the abilty to plot forth and back between skeleton (the bones which are skinned) and FK/IK-rig (as in MB - because this is the best way to align different IK Pivots to what the actual animation on the skeleton is doing), or would I need to make my own script?

What can FBIK do which HIK can't in Maya, meaning why would I ever want to even use fbik again - the HIK looks much more excactly like MB and therefore better?

If you are allowed to say - Is the strategy to morph MB into Maya completely?

Thasnks,
Leander.

Sorry for the late reply, I use abAutoRig its free and extremely customisable www.supercrumbly.com/archives.php?sid=173

it offers a modular approach and provides seamless IK / FK switching via embedded Mel.

Highly recommended for those on a budget (free)

On another topic, I've just recently begun to study the use of mo-cap (vicon) , MotionBuilder and how to use these tools in a Maya Pipeline, will be watching through these videos again.

Could you put the link up for the webcast you mentioned with 'Kynapse and Beast' ?

Thank you so much for these