Seperate IK/FK Bones?

[anon_80943217]

I was looking at this:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Modeling%20Optimized%20Characters.html

Separate out IK and FK
Separate out Inverse Kinematics (IK) and Forward Kinematics (FK). When animations are imported the IK nodes are baked into FK, thus Unity doesn’t need the IK nodes at all. You can either kill the GameObjects in Unity or the nodes in the modelling tool. By removing them, the IK nodes don’t need to be animated every frame anymore. For this reason it is a very bad idea to intermix IK and FK hierarchies. Instead you should create two hierarchies: one strictly for IK and one for FK. This way you can very easily select the whole IK hierarchy and delete it.

What I am curious about is how do you know if your ik/fk bone hierachy are seperate? Is there a tutorial that shows you how to rig like this?

Ive begun to start to rig my character and I want to make sure I am doing it correctly for Unity.

[techmage]

There is no improper way to rig for unity. All it really means is that, unity bakes all animation down to forward kinematics, on one skeleton. So if you do any fancy work with driven keys, or IK, or 3 skeleton setups or whatnot, just make it so you can delete everything except the single forward kinematic skeleton easily.

Personally what I do in maya is I have everything to be deleted stored in a quick select set, so the I bake my animation, hit the quick select set, delete, then export to fbx.

[Gnimmel]

You can rig any way you want. The rigs I use for unity are the same rigs I use for highres rendered animations, the only difference is you need a way to get rid of everything that isn’t needed when importing it into unity.

Personally, I use 2 files. I have one that I call the DefMesh (deformation mesh) and then the rig file. The DefMesh is what unity needs, it’s just the character rigged to a FK joint chain and nothing else. I then build my animation rig by adding splineIK spine, IK/FK switching arms and legs, reverse foot etc. etc. and use this for animation. I reference all my rigs, so I can’t just hit delete like eem sugested above. I wrote a script to import back in the Defmesh and bake that to the animation rig. This way I can reference my character rig in case I want to make changes it to latter, animate on a full rig, and then bake the animation from the full rig to the simple FK DefMesh for unity.

You asked for tutorials, if you want to learn a lot about rigging, Jason Schleifer’s DVD’s are the best for maya. For a cheaper alternative there are lots of free online tutorials if you do a quick search.

Cheers,

Richard

[jengy]

@Gnimmel

You can rig any way you want. The rigs I use for unity are the same rigs I use for highres rendered animations, the only difference is you need a way to get rid of everything that isn’t needed when importing it into unity.

Personally, I use 2 files. I have one that I call the DefMesh (deformation mesh) and then the rig file. The DefMesh is what unity needs, it’s just the character rigged to a FK joint chain and nothing else. I then build my animation rig by adding splineIK spine, IK/FK switching arms and legs, reverse foot etc. etc. and use this for animation. I reference all my rigs, so I can’t just hit delete like eem sugested above. I wrote a script to import back in the Defmesh and bake that to the animation rig. This way I can reference my character rig in case I want to make changes it to latter, animate on a full rig, and then bake the animation from the full rig to the simple FK DefMesh for unity.

You asked for tutorials, if you want to learn a lot about rigging, Jason Schleifer’s DVD’s are the best for maya. For a cheaper alternative there are lots of free online tutorials if you do a quick search.

Whoa, that’s pretty cool, and makes a lot of sense.

Do you think the Animator Friendly DVDs are still worth it, or is there an updated version that would be just as good?