General Category > Ongoing Anim8or Development

IK tool

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johnar:
Thanks steve
 By the way. Good job on the trackball visibility thing. Tidies things up immensely,
All thumbs up.

nemyax:

--- Quote from: daniel99 on October 15, 2016, 10:05:06 pm ---I lock the feet of a character, then moving the body. The feet are kept in place. When I make a step, I move the locked foot using its controller.
Without the IK, animating a walk is a bit annoying, because the feet will always kinda slip.

--- End quote ---
Consider these animation keys from a different animation program that doesn't have the concept of "locks" and doesn't need it. They are position keys for the IK target of the right foot in a walk cycle (left/right, backward/forward and up/down).

There's no micromanagement to it, it's pure holds and slopes, which an animator understands immediately. All you need to do to animate a "lock" is go to the frame directly before the "unlock" should happen and set a position key, creating a hold.
You don't have to keep track of something called a "lock", and you animate the motion of the end effector like you would animate anything: hold, jump forward in an arc, hold, jump forward. As for the foot staying planted, it should do that anyway as long as IK is enabled.
I believe that if the IK end effector has animatable transforms (position, rotation and scale) and an animatable IK on/off switch, it has  everything. (Well, almost everything; some kind of IK chain twist control would also help so you can swing the IK chain left and right.)

johnar:
If i could just chime in, i think what nemyax is saying is absolutely correct, and i'm thinking this is perhaps just a bit of a misunderstanding between 'lock' and 'hold', which are essentially the same, but just under a different name.
Traditionally, the correct word is 'hold'
 Anim8or has keys, just as any other animation program, and a 'lock' key is really just a 'hold' key anyway, which will 'lock, or hold' that position until a different key is set, in which case it has become 'unheld, or unlocked'.
 Same with rotation/(orientation) keys.
 This is how anim8or already works, so i'm pretty sure the usual key method would be no different for 'holding/(locking)' an end effector into place.  8)

nemyax:

--- Quote from: johnar on October 16, 2016, 12:50:02 pm ---Anim8or has keys, just as any other animation program, and a 'lock' key is really just a 'hold' key anyway, which will 'lock, or hold' that position until a different key is set, in which case it has become 'unheld, or unlocked'.

--- End quote ---
Not quite. A position hold is only a special case of animated position. That's why I'm emphasising that the generic ability to animate the effector position is needed.

Steve:
I think the term "locked" is a bit misleading; I should pick a better one. What "locking" an end effector does is actually enable IK. When the "locked" effectors are animated (I'm working on this now :) ) they will move in a manner similar to any other key-animated point, along with the position of the figure. After these values have been set, the IK system will position the joints in the IK chains for all "locked" effectors.

If an effector isn't moved between two keys, it is locked in place, hence the term locked. The spline interpolation needs to be slightly different for effectors or the won't be held exactly in the same place between two keys with the same value. Instead there is a bit of overshoot caused by the so called "lowest energy" shape that they normally assume.

A better term might be "active" or "enabled" or "???". Any ideas?

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