Advanced Rigging

No Flip Kee

Introduction

This tutorial is based on the no flip knee described in The Art of Rigging Volume 1 pages 13 through 16 (available for purchase at CG Toolkit or you can ask Kendal nicely to borrow hers).

Tutorial

1. DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU CREATED A POLE VECTOR!
2. Select l_leg_ikHandle. What we are about to do will make the leg twist, don't worry! We will fix it by the end of the tutorial.
3. Set Pole Vector X to 0.1 and Pole Vector Y and Z to 0.
4. Set Twist to 90.
5. Select l_foot_anim
6. Add two attributes using the attributes button in the shelf. Type in 'knee offset'.
7. Open the hypershade in Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade
8. Go to Create > General Utilities > +/- Average
9. Ctrl + Click the l_leg_ikHandle and l_foot_anim in the outliner then click the input/output connections button in the hypergraph to show them both.
10. Right click the right side of the l_foot_anim node and select single > knee.
11. Connectet it to the averaging node by right clicking on the left side of the averaging node. Choose the input1D[0] connection.
12. Right click the right side of the l_foot_anim node and select single > offset.
13. Connectet it to the averaging node by right clicking on the left side of the averaging node. Choose the input1D[1] connection.
14. Right click the right side of the averaging node and select Output1D.
15. Connectet it to the l_leg_ikHandle by right clicking on the left side of the ikHandle node and selecting twist.
16. Select l_foot_anim and type in an offset value of 90.
17. Hide the offset attribute in the channel box.
18. Done! Now when you change the value for "knee" it should have the same effect as moving a knee control. Hooray!