Unfortunately, the solution was a bit premature. It was working last night, all virtual bones were functional and so were the foot ik mechanisms driving the foot placement. However, almost all virtual bones stopped working when I opened up the project today. This is true for all animations except for the forward walk animation, which maintains proper virtual bone movement during the animation. In all other animations, the virtual bones behave oddly, the feet virtual bones don’t move from their original positions, but the hand virtual bones still move properly.
Walk animation where the virtual bones are still working:
Strafe animation where the feet have stopped working:
And then to thicken the plot, I remade a new walk forward animation to see if it was consistent. It wasn’t, not only did the feet stop working but the hand iks stopped working as well:
It looks like the origin of the hand ik bones moves with the skeleton since they are children of the hands, but the targets of those hand ik bones (the other hand) do not update their position. The foot ik system is parented to the root, and since it doesn’t update the end position of the virtual bone, they never move. I don’t know why the virtual bones would exhibit this behavior and I definitely don’t understand why it would change from last night.
VB Curves = targeting root
VB ik_foot_root = targeting root
VB ik_foot_l/r = targeting foot_L/R
VB ik_foot_l/r_Offset = targeting foot_L/R
VB ik_knee_target_l/r = targeting calf_L/R
VB foot_target_l/r = targeting foot_L/R
I’ve tried to delete and create the bones since that worked last night but that did not do anything this time around. I’ve opened and closed the project a few times but noticed no changes in behavior. Virtual bones don’t really seem to have any settings, I’m not sure how I’d have user error with them since there is nothing really to tinker with. Is this just pure bug territory?