I was curious whether people were using Animation Rigging to fine-tune finger placement using a ChainIK constraint? I tried it out a bit tonight, and found that the results a little unstable (the finger would bend awkwardly at the second knuckle in cases where a normal person would bend at the first knuckle; joints would bend backwards in some cases (seems there’s no Hint option here?)), but those might have been at extreme positions. In many other cases, the finger worked pretty well.
What I don’t know is whether having 10 Chain IK constraints on the model is an issue for performance. Is Chain IK a recommended approach to animating fingers? Is there some other constraint that makes more sense? Or is this asking for a bit too much, and I should just animate fingers with key-frames, the old fashion way?
Playing around with this a bit more, it seems that a multi-rotation constraint feels better for fingers. I added two constraints, so that bone1 and bone2 of the finger are constrained by bone3’s rotation. So now rotating the finger tip causes the rest of the finger joints to rotate. This seems pretty good to me. Usually with fingers, I just want all the bones to rotation together, so actual IK doesn’t seem necessary.
I don’t see a constraint with that name. It sounds like you might be combining two constraints: Chain IK, and Twist Correction. I don’t think Twist Correction is appropriate here, since the fingers don’t twist, and Chain IK seems to be overkill (and a bit messy, per my first post).
I’m more inclined to conclude that Multi-rotation is the right choice here. Fingers bending is very similar to the example project’s “mRotation” scene, which has a buy bending over, where you just rotate his head to get rotation of several of his spine bones at the same time. Unless someone wants to correct me, I think this is what I’ll use for the finger bones.
Ah, neat. And good call, I’m on 2019.4, and I don’t have the option of using 2020.1, so I’ll have to make due with the multi-rotation I guess. Thanks for mentioning it though.
I figured I’d mention, I don’t know why I was overthinking things initially, but 2-bone IK is actually fine for fingers. I probably was thinking “Fingers have three bones, so I can’t use two-bone IK”. But 2-bone IK performs IK on two bones in response to changes to a 3rd bone. So, in the case of fingers, you can just plug in the three finger bones:
What I still don’t know is whether there are any performance considerations to using a lot of rigs and constraints, or whether this is all such efficient jobified code that it doesn’t matter. We’ll see.
What i did that in the child component of the rig component i added Multi rotation constraint and constrained the finger with external source empty object to control the rotation
