BIK: Full Body IK Solver

[darkZ]

@nkey

Any chance for alpha for “should sink”? (See my post)

We are currently working on a feature set due for 0.8.0 release. We will investigate this soon after and have added this to our board. Thank you very much for the feedback.

If you could provide a bit further information for your request through email we would really appreciate it as it is still not entirely clear to us and if we could support this.

Thanks!

[J.C.Smith]

@FatMoth

Anyone know if this conflicts with VR Expansion plugin, or can I can package just fine?

We’ve used it with it. It took a little bit of tweaking but its working good now. Some notes as it may be useful:

• We had issues when placing the BodyMesh under ParentRelativeAttachment. It worked fine so long as it wasn’t parented to it though.
• We moved the foot effectors to be a child of BodyMesh.
• We had a perplexing issue where the Head Effector was working fine in the editor but on a packaged build it was not working properly. In the end we discovered that this was due to having a Physical Surface which we named “Head” on the head and neck. Simply renaming the physical surface to something different fixed the issue.

There were some other things here or there but just going from memory. It does work though.

[n00854180t]

@J.C.Smith

We’ve used it with it. It took a little bit of tweaking but its working good now. Some notes as it may be useful:

• We had issues when placing the BodyMesh under ParentRelativeAttachment. It worked fine so long as it wasn’t parented to it though.
• We moved the foot effectors to be a child of BodyMesh.
• We had a perplexing issue where the Head Effector was working fine in the editor but on a packaged build it was not working properly. In the end we discovered that this was due to having a Physical Surface which we named “Head” on the head and neck. Simply renaming the physical surface to something different fixed the issue.

There were some other things here or there but just going from memory. It does work though.

Thanks for the tips - these would be annoying to track down individually and I think many BIK users will be using VR Expansion if doing VR.

[The_Revera_Corporation]

@J.C.Smith

We’ve used it with it. It took a little bit of tweaking but its working good now. Some notes as it may be useful:

• We had issues when placing the BodyMesh under ParentRelativeAttachment. It worked fine so long as it wasn’t parented to it though.
• We moved the foot effectors to be a child of BodyMesh.
• We had a perplexing issue where the Head Effector was working fine in the editor but on a packaged build it was not working properly. In the end we discovered that this was due to having a Physical Surface which we named “Head” on the head and neck. Simply renaming the physical surface to something different fixed the issue.

There were some other things here or there but just going from memory. It does work though.

Hi J.C. Smith,

Thanks for your notes!

Best,

[FatMoth]

@J.C.Smith

We’ve used it with it. It took a little bit of tweaking but its working good now. Some notes as it may be useful:

• We had issues when placing the BodyMesh under ParentRelativeAttachment. It worked fine so long as it wasn’t parented to it though.
• We moved the foot effectors to be a child of BodyMesh.
• We had a perplexing issue where the Head Effector was working fine in the editor but on a packaged build it was not working properly. In the end we discovered that this was due to having a Physical Surface which we named “Head” on the head and neck. Simply renaming the physical surface to something different fixed the issue.

There were some other things here or there but just going from memory. It does work though.

Thanks man! Yeah parent relative didn’t work when I tried writing my own IK system cause the pawn won’t respect floor collision that way. I ended up writing an offset setup to match collision offset in the expansion plugin to give full roomscale support.
Another way that may work (havn’t tried it) is putting another capsule in the parent relative and putting the pawn in there. That way it runs the pawn how epic designed it still, and would be a bit faster and a bit cheaper than my way. Ill try it when we get the 4.17 version of BIK.
This BIK plugin is great though! Got it running in 4.16 in only like 1-2 hours, super clean.

[darkZ]

@FatMoth

Thanks man! Yeah parent relative didn’t work when I tried writing my own IK system cause the pawn won’t respect floor collision that way. I ended up writing an offset setup to match collision offset in the expansion plugin to give full roomscale support.
Another way that may work (havn’t tried it) is putting another capsule in the parent relative and putting the pawn in there. That way it runs the pawn how epic designed it still, and would be a bit faster and a bit cheaper than my way. Ill try it when we get the 4.17 version of BIK.
This BIK plugin is great though! Got it running in 4.16 in only like 1-2 hours, super clean.

Thanks FatMoth.
We are doing some early tests of our 4.17 version for the 0.8.0 plugin release. Please email us and we can send you the link to download.
Also, if anyone else needs a 4.17 version right away, please feel free to email us ().

[MagicBots]

@FatMoth

Thanks man! Yeah parent relative didn’t work when I tried writing my own IK system cause the pawn won’t respect floor collision that way. I ended up writing an offset setup to match collision offset in the expansion plugin to give full roomscale support.
Another way that may work (havn’t tried it) is putting another capsule in the parent relative and putting the pawn in there. That way it runs the pawn how epic designed it still, and would be a bit faster and a bit cheaper than my way. Ill try it when we get the 4.17 version of BIK.
This BIK plugin is great though! Got it running in 4.16 in only like 1-2 hours, super clean.

I had made a setup with body tracking using Ikinema runtime indie before they took away the ability to use trackers with it, and it was working for me by just not using the parent relative attachment component for the skeletal mesh. Though, I was using Simple Character with the expansion plugin which uses the capsule more like epic designed it, I think… Planning to switch to VRCharacter as I impliment BIK, and curious if you were using VRCharacter or SimpleVRCharacter from the expansion plugin? Curious to know what caveats i might run into with a switch to VRCharacter from SimpleVRCharacter if that’s the case.

[FatMoth]

@alltrueist

I had made a setup with body tracking using Ikinema runtime indie before they took away the ability to use trackers with it, and it was working for me by just not using the parent relative attachment component for the skeletal mesh. Though, I was using Simple Character with the expansion plugin which uses the capsule more like epic designed it, I think… Planning to switch to VRCharacter as I impliment BIK, and curious if you were using VRCharacter or SimpleVRCharacter from the expansion plugin? Curious to know what caveats i might run into with a switch to VRCharacter from SimpleVRCharacter if that’s the case.

I was using the VRCharacter, not the simple one. I just set it up on 4.17 last night, and it all works good. I still use my offset logic, but the expansion plugin just got a new commit like 2 days ago from a 3rd party which will give you roomscale support parented with parent relative because it pushes the SK mesh position to the bottom of the capsule how it is supposed to be. Saves performance that way. Ill switch mine soon, but if you try it let me know how it goes.

[MagicBots]

@FatMoth

I was using the VRCharacter, not the simple one. I just set it up on 4.17 last night, and it all works good. I still use my offset logic, but the expansion plugin just got a new commit like 2 days ago from a 3rd party which will give you roomscale support parented with parent relative because it pushes the SK mesh position to the bottom of the capsule how it is supposed to be. Saves performance that way. Ill switch mine soon, but if you try it let me know how it goes.

Thanks for the info about the update to push the skeletal mesh to the floor. I made sure to grab a commit with that in it, however I’m unable to tell what it’s doing visibly. Is it just an optimization thing? No visible change to the capsule or anything else that i can see with the ‘use feet location’ toggle on or off. The capsule appears to follow me around in room scale by default with parent relative attachment and vrcharacter, which didn’t seem to be the case a while ago when i tried it.

The parent relative attachment seems to have lost the ability to use a pelvis tracker as the parent instead of camera with my update to 4.17 though. Going to ask on the expansion thread for a fix. I think it might just be due to a component he deprecated for the trackers needing to be set on there.

Edit: Mordentral answered that I need to just use a setter function to set the pelvis tracker as parent. It’s not toggleable directly in parent relative attachment component.

[FatMoth]

When I recompile the project, it says this plugin won’t work, and I can’t re open project. Anyone know a fix?

[John_Alcatraz]

We are currently working on a feature set due for 0.8.0 release.

Is it possible by now to use this with a custom version of the engine?

[darkZ]

@John_Alcatraz

Is it possible by now to use this with a custom version of the engine?

Yes, it should work. Please email if you run into any issues.

[Rogue_Programmer]

Reporting in from Harpey Games here. We are currently using Anomotion FullBodyIKPlugin in our game and think it’s great! After evaluating both IKinema and BIK, we decided on BIK for our upcoming game. UE 4.17. Our Pawn/Character class is derived from the excellent VRExpansionPlugin and we also have AdvancedSessions integrated as well. I think the combo of BIK, VRExpansionPlugin and AdvancedSessions works great for a multiplayer VR game. We had a little difficulty getting BIK and VRExpansion working together at first, but the guys at Anomotion and mordentral helped us to get it working.

Now that we have the basic three tracker setup (Vive HMD & 2x Motion Controllers) working, I’m looking forward to experimenting with a six tracker setup. That is something you can’t do with IKinema because they limit you to only three trackers and make you buy a completely different product to do waist and feet tracking. Anyways, keep up the good work guys.

[John_Alcatraz]

Yes, it should work. Please email if you run into any issues.

Do you have an estimate on how long will this still be in “alpha”?

I’m mostly interested in quadruped IK, do you also support 6 and 8 legged characters or is it limited to 4? If yes, when will 6 and 8 be supported? Do you have any example videos of quadruped characters walking on uneven grounds, like in the many videos where you showed that for 2 legged characters?

Also, how performance heavy is it? Is it fully running on the game thread or is some of the work done on separate threads? Do you offer a trial version by now so that its possible to see if the performance cost is acceptable?

[shulideren]

hi
How can I get this plugins?

[superman_tb]

@ There is a cooking error in packaging game progress with 0.8.0 BIK Source Build.See the picture as blew.

Any solution?

[FatMoth]

@superman_tb

@ There is a cooking error in packaging game progress with 0.8.0 BIK Source Build.See the picture as blew.

Any solution?

What engine version are you using? Also did you put the plugin, in your engine, or project directory? Looks like DRM thing is not registering. Just want to know what you did because I have to change over to source build for my dedicated servers.

[Xodroc]

@AlfornoOne

Reporting in from Harpey Games here. We are currently using Anomotion FullBodyIKPlugin in our game and think it’s great! After evaluating both IKinema and BIK, we decided on BIK for our upcoming game. UE 4.17. Our Pawn/Character class is derived from the excellent VRExpansionPlugin and we also have AdvancedSessions integrated as well. I think the combo of BIK, VRExpansionPlugin and AdvancedSessions works great for a multiplayer VR game. We had a little difficulty getting BIK and VRExpansion working together at first, but the guys at Anomotion and mordentral helped us to get it working.

Now that we have the basic three tracker setup (Vive HMD & 2x Motion Controllers) working, I’m looking forward to experimenting with a six tracker setup. That is something you can’t do with IKinema because they limit you to only three trackers and make you buy a completely different product to do waist and feet tracking. Anyways, keep up the good work guys.

It would be nice if this was documented somewhere for other customers who use the same plugins. The only reason I’ve thought about evaluating IKinema is for more extensive documentation/support(In theory). Only reason I haven’t is because BIK isn’t the only plugin I’m having trouble with now, waiting forever for people to respond. Sounds as if you’ve had a much better experience.

[superman_tb]

@FatMoth

What engine version are you using? Also did you put the plugin, in your engine, or project directory? Looks like DRM thing is not registering. Just want to know what you did because I have to change over to source build for my dedicated servers.

ue4.17.I put the plugin in the project directory.

[darkZ]

@Xodroc

It would be nice if this was documented somewhere for other customers who use the same plugins. The only reason I’ve thought about evaluating IKinema is for more extensive documentation/support(In theory). Only reason I haven’t is because BIK isn’t the only plugin I’m having trouble with now, waiting forever for people to respond. Sounds as if you’ve had a much better experience.

Hi Xodroc,

We apologize for the delay in responding to you as you sent an email from an unknown email address to us. That was partly the reason it was missed, apologies. We have now added your contact information in our database. I have responded to your email, if you can respond to it we will be able to resolve any outstanding issues you might be facing.