Set Up #9 - IK/FK Switch for Arms Issue

This messed up quite a bit - I don't know how it messed up, and I don't know why it did, but it went horribly wrong.

This post would of spoken about the creating switch to allow the arms to go from Inverse Kinematics (IK) to Forward Kinematics (FK). While it ended up as failure - I still want to share with you what I did and how it would of worked if it went smoothly.

So, the first thing I did was duplicate the Wrist Control wrist twice, I then snapped those curves to the shoulder joint and the elbow joint of the arm. Once they were positioned (Fig 1) - I froze the transformations and named them as the following:

• shoulderFKControl
• wristFKControl

Fig 1: Highlighted curves for each arm, appropriately named

I then proceeded to add a Point Constraint to those points and then I added an Orient Constraint. The problem now that while the controls were set up - I could not move them. This was because the I needed to switch the joints from IK Mode to FK Mode. If you click the IK Handle there is a value that's called ik_Blend and that's the value that'll be used for another Set Driven Key. I had to create another attribute on the wrist control curve and called it ik_fk Blend - and this will be the driver attribute I used for this Driven Key.

After this was all set up I clicked on the visibility values in the driven as this will be what is affected and hit key, the issue that came up was something I couldn't fix but had to work around, but when I set the joints to FK and then IK - nothing moved at all. I spent a good hour trying to figure out what and where went wrong and I couldn't fix it so I re-opened a version previous and create the switch without testing it after moving it into FK mode.

That was it for the rig set up, now it's time for the skinning techniques.