Introduction to Character Rigging in Maya

In this lesson, we'll add IK Handles to our arm and leg chains. Let's go ahead and activate our IK Handle tool. Double click the tool in the toolbar and get to its settings. And I'll reset the settings. OK. So you can see by default, we're working with an SC solver-- and, basically, stands for single chain. Now, we don't want to use it in this case. Instead, we want to use the rotate plane solver, because with that we're going to be able to get the elbow and knee twisting from our chain. We discussed this in more detail in our introduction to rigging course. But with that now active, and with it set to rotate plane, we'll go ahead and create these IK Handles-- one for our arm, connecting from our start joint to the end joint, which in this case is the arm to the wrist. And we'll create one more for the leg, going from the thigh to the ankle. Right. So as we start to move this IK Handle around, notice we're getting that natural bending from the leg. All right, great. Now, I'd also like to mention this to you, if you were to select the root, start to move that around, that leg is not going to remain planted just yet. We are going to set up constraints to get it working the way we need it to. But I want to show you this really quick, if we were to go ahead and select this IK Handle and press Control-A to head over to our Attribute Editor-- or we can use these tabs, which is new to 2011. Notice underneath the IK Handle attributes we have this parameter called, stickiness. With it off, well, the IK Handle basically acts as if it's parented to this leg chain. But if we go ahead and turn on sticky, notice this-- if we were to select that root bone again and start to move the chain around, that leg's going to be planted. So that's just a way of temporarily planting that IK Handle. To really set that up, what we're going to do is again create control so that it will behave the way it needs to. All right. Well now that we have these IK Handles in place again, we can move them around and get an idea of the natural functionality we'll be able to get from the arm and leg. All right, great. From here I'd like to go ahead and rename them. So for the arm, that's going to be left_armIK01. I'll copy that name and use it for the legs IK. So that's going to be legIK01. Great. So now that we have our IK Handles in place, the next step is going to be to mirror over our arm and leg chains. And we'll do that in the next lesson.