So I am relatively new to using control rigs - but i’ve read all the documentation and tried quite a few things out and spent a good few days debugging and i’ve come to a point where I think i’m a little fundamentally confused as to what tool I am supposed to use when.
[Please help correct me where i’m misunderstanding the below!]
To my understanding:
Backwards resolving takes incoming FK poses/anims and allows me to bake them into my controls
Forwards resolving takes control positions and bakes them into the FK rig
Ok makes sense - but now my confusion:
If you go through the content examples for feet tracing - the first thing necessary (because the control rig is the last step in the animation profile sequence) is to take the incoming pose and bake it into the controls.
This must be setup on the ‘forward resolve’ because that is all that runs in the animation profile.
So this means I end up with logic that looks identical to backwards resolve logic - as the first step of my forwards resolve logic.
Additionally I cannot hook both backwards+forwards up to the same pins so I cannot reuse anything (i’m sure there is a way around this - this isn’t my biggest confusion).
The killer for me is:
Now my forward resolve logic starts with ‘bake the fk positions into the ik controls’ - I lose the ability to actually move and control them in the control rig editor. They’ve become ‘uncontrollable’ controls!
So what am I missing?
As to me it would seem to make infinitely more sense if animation profile ran backwards+forward resolve rather than just forwards so that incoming poses/anims are baked into the initial control position - avoiding me having to duplicate my backwards resolve logic but also then affording me the ability to run as I like (either forwards or backwards+forwards) in the control rig editor to still control my character.
Surely then i’d have a re-usable control rig that could do everything and not require fiddling with each time I switch task.
This peculiarity seems backed up by the fact i’ve seen now a few control rig examples expose a boolean to turn on/off the feet tracing (and fk bake to control logic that sits in forward resolving).