These plugins are now available for 3ds max 2012 and can be downloaded from here:

http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolver.php
http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/animatablePivot.php

Well… after several weeks of beta testing, thousands of lines of code, and hundreds of cups of coffee, the release version of the free plugins ikfk solver and the animatable pivot constraint are now available. The latest version of the solver has several improvements, it’s stable and it can now work perfectly with the pivot constraint and any other kind of setups. Download them from here:

http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolver.php
http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/animatablePivot.php

It has been the work of only one person here, but a lot of people have assisted me in the Quality Assurance part of the project. Maybe something have been missed in the vast amount of things that had to be considered to make these tools working perfect, if that happens and you find any bug or any improvement that these tools should have, don’t hessitate to email me at joleanes@gmail.com. In the next few days I’ll be publishing a video tutorial to implement these tools in your rigs, so you can make the most of it.

I have to give special thanks for their useful suport in QA to these people: Carolina Delgado, Alejandro Albarracin, Ian Arias, Paul Hormis, Toke Jepsen.

Usually a rigger has the duty of solving several technicals problems and building a lot of diffirent kind of rigs, but sometimes it’s job can become too mechanical, like having to do something that is supossed to be automatically created by the tool. Since i started to learn rigging i saw the process of rigging an arm or leg like that: too mechanical, even a lot of tech artist preffer to create a script to make this rigging process automatic.

Well, in order to rig a leg you have to do this: create three hierarchies. The first is used to transform the leg in IK, the second in FK, and the last is used to blend between those two. Some sort of UI controls have to be created to control the switching and matching mechanism and other expressions has to be used in order to implement squash & stretch…  that’s the most common technique using default rigging tools.

Now there is other alternative, it’s an IKFK solver, and it’s job is to automate all that process by just having only one hierarchy that can be transformed in both modes (IK and FK) depending on the needs of the animator.

It would be nice if you can give it a look. It is a beta version and it could have some bugs, i haven’t saw any by now, maybe i have to look deeper .

Check this video: http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolverVideo.php

And download it from here:  http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolver.php

Hi there, the first plugin has been added to the script-plugin section. I have been working some time on it a long time ago, but now i have been able to compile the release version, and also i have made a tutorial to show how it works. I hope that you can find it useful for some kind of animations that could be dificult to do with standard methods, and for some special rig behaviours.

Here you can find the controller: Animatable Pivot.

And here you can watch the tutorial: Using Animatable Pivot Constraint.

See you then.