BIK: Full Body IK Solver

[darkZ]

@Whammy;634968

I looked at that tutorial and gave it a try. What I found was that the head does track quite well. But the arms/hands only partially follow since the torso motion is distributed. (The head look motion is being distributed thru the spine a little at each bone junction.) For example, suppose the head may want to do a simple look up 40 degrees to track an aim target. The neck01, spine01, spine02 and spine03 may only bend 10 degrees each to achieve the 40 degree head tilt. This means the arms are off 10 degrees (the amount of bend in neck01.) This gets worse if there is any body twisting involved. Also, having a target that’s nearby is also problematic because the weapon’s viewpoint is often quite a bit lower than the head’s viewpoint (especially true for hip fired weapons) which creates a nasty looking parallax problem for weapon aiming.

I believe Ikinema has a feature that allows the arms to have their own aim target. I don’t think having a separate aim target is really necessary (though it does allow the character to look around while continuing to hold aim). But the ability of the IK solver to explicitly move the hands/arms to track a target would be a welcome addition. It might work as having the hand effectors setting the initial grip position and allowing the user to specify weapon forward vector (like the head does). Then a weapon look animation node would move the arms to track an aim target using an analogous feature to BLook. I would see the animation chain as applying the character animation, then applying a base aim offset to establish a rough aiming posture, and finally allowing BIK/BLook to make their adjustments as needed.

I see, this all makes sense. Thank you for the detailed description. I will look into how to support this with BIK.

Best,