Feature Focus: Limb IK

[Jeff Almasol]

Arm IK is now called Limb IK and can control the bend directions and stretching of legs, as well as arms. For example, pin a hand in place while moving the rest of the body or make a character's feet stick to the ground as its squats in a more realistic way.

Check out the following walkthrough video for Limb IK:

Try out Limb IK using the following example puppets!

• DraggerDude.puppet
• Chloe Full Limb IK.puppet
• LimbIKBot.puppet

Note: Limb IK and Walk behaviors on the same puppet might cause issues because both want to control the same handles. If you do have both behaviors applied, consider turning off Limb IK when animating walk cycles, and turning off Walk when doing general body animation. Limb IK should work fine in side and 3/4 views.

(Use this Beta forum thread to discuss this feature and share your feedback with the Character Animator team and other Beta users. If you encounter a bug while using this feature, let us know by posting a reply here or choosing "Report a bug" from the "Provide feedback" icon in the top-right corner of the app.)

[CoSA_DaveS]

Limb IK (and other behaviors like Face) can work as a single behavior at the top level of the puppet controlling multiple views as long as each set of limbs (or facial parts, etc.) is contained in a group that is tagged as a view (Frontal, Left Quarter, etc.). You can tell that a behavior organizes its layers this way when you see this tool tip in the puppet panel’s properties panel:

 If you want all views to have the same parameter values, this is ideal. If you want each view to have its own parameter settings, then as oksamurai suggests above you can apply the behavior to each group individually.