Search the Community

i've been working with 3d figures and rigging and animation for... decades, here. but i can NOT get blender's IK to work for me in a way i understand. i come from poser, where using ik is dead easy TL;DR------------------------------------------------------------------ you load your figure, you turn off ik, you pose the arms, you pose the legs. you turn on ik, THE POSE STAYS THE SAME. you move the hands/feet to move the limbs (i do understand this is actually blender's 'targetless ik'), or you move the body and the limbs stay in place. you turn off ik, THE POSE STAYS THE SAME*. and everything is keyframed and comes out the way it looks. (*: okay, often the hands would come out with ridiculous 1760 degree rotations or something, but that was a relatively minor fix.) tl;dr------------------------------------------------------------------------ in blender, if i turn on ik and pose the rig, the limbs are not keyframed. and if i import this animation to sl, the limbs just remain straight. i've tried keying visual rotation, but that won't auto-key. on top of everything, if i turn ik on, or i turn ik off after doing some posing, the pose completely changes. now, avastar has functions to copy the pose to the ik rig, or to copy the pose to the fk rig. which i try to use... but they only seem to work about 90% of the time, and only on the default human rig. if i try to adjust the rig to make it work better for me, and for my model... it's out the window. all the ik tutorials for blender that i've found are basically the same, and set up the ik the same way avastar has its ik set up. basically, not useful if i want to set up my own custom ik. which i must want to do, since the basic ik isn't working for me. ??? i did have limited success with changing the avastar ik in this manner: i used the ikWrist and the ikFootToePivot, and i set the ik chain to put the tip on the control handle. (it drives me nuts when the wrist bone is right on top of the ik control handle.) then i turned off the ik for the 'ankle' bone, and created it on the 'foot' bone. i changed both ik chain lengths from 2 to 4 (foot, ankle, shin, thigh & wrist, forearm, shoulder, collar). and lastly, i ended up deleting the pole controls, because omg, they are a pain! and they wreck everything. now when i moved the ik controls, the limbs moved with them reasonably. when i moved the cog, the endpoints remained in place. also, if i wanted to 'temporarily turn off ik to rotate a bone using fk,' i selected the control handle, then the bone with the action center set to 'active.' that way, when i rotated, say, the thigh bone, the foot controller moved with the whole leg, like i'm used to. as some inexplicable bonus, i didn't have to go back and convert any of the keyframes from ik to fk (and i have no idea why). the bad news is... when i tried to append actions made this way to the default rig (i was working on a project created by another modeler/rigger), they totally blew up. and, when i went to turn off the ik controls to polish off the animation keyframes... the ik and fk poses were decidedly different, so THAT didn't work. basically, what i want is to be able to seamlessly switch between using Ik and using the regular FK rig, using custom settings of my choosing. or how to set up an ik rig that will do that. or... what i really really want is the rigify tool as seen here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/65290/how-can-i-seamless-switch-between-ik-fk is there a way to surgically replace the avastar green pose bones with a rigify rig? if i dont care about sliders? is there a way to create a rigify meta-rig or something that will control the avastar green bones? is there a way to autokey 'visual rotation' whenever a limb changes? blender doesn't seem to recognize when the bones visually rotate. you know, i THINK i understand how blender ik works. i can grasp the target thing and the chain thing. i even get the pole thing and the pole angle control whatever. but i don't understand why it doesn't work right for me.

So I've been trying to figure out why blender 2.79 has its issues for me to upload any rigged mesh into second life. I confirm rotation/size/location and double check all proper export selections are made, however after bringing the .dae file into second life and adding "skin weights" to be show in the window, there's an automatic deformation to it. I do know that I'm using the fitted mesh skeleton, and that once i transfer weights and adjust it properly, they all move correctly, however, It always has the same issue, despite configuring and setting things properly. I've gone through several different tutorials and have been using blender for quite a while, but the new update seems to have changed some things. Any idea on how to fix the issue or anyone who could do a walkthrough for rigged mesh without using Avastar for blender 2.79, or would it be best to revert back to an older version?

I have had no problems at all updating Blender the last few times but I spent the whole morning getting 2.78c BACK. So just a warning. My issues (whatever they may be as my computer HAS been running flawlessly (knocking on plastic) ) may not be yours (Win10Pro). A few of the add-ons that I either wanted to try or used all the time didn't work. So I went back to 2.78 (or tried). A restore point didn't work at all and so I lost my install from April. After doing a lot of deleting of 2.79 files to get a clean uninstall (the regular uninstall didn't work well enough to install the earlier version back -- and running CCleaner and rebooting several times, I finally appear to have 2.78 up and running as it has been. The add-on that I needed was working again fine there also. But it was a long morning. So, just a heads up that this doesn't seem to be as stable as the previous official releases. Maybe waiting a bit with a "b" version or whatever might be a good plan. I suspect that it WILL work fine for those not needing add-ons. There were a few issues with the installation itself but easily enough to fix, just some extra time. Still, installing (if you can) in another directory might be good and leaving your previous just in case. That has worked for me before but it has been awhile so not sure it is possible now.