Spring IK

Spring IK

There's a cool and somewhat secret function in Maya for whatever reason, called the "IK Spring Solver".

It's great for creating quadraped legs, amongst other mechanics in rigs. In order to 'unlock' this secret attribute when creating your IK node, type in the MEL command line: ikSpringSolver;

In my opinion, this should be something that should load automatically with Maya by default. But then that's just a rigger's way of thinking, right?

Problem when moving the Global Control

Depending on your creature/character rig setup, when moving the global control you may find that the IK spring solver does not follow the way it should. In my case, I had a broken hierarchy, linked together with parent constraints. The way this issue was fixed was to delete the constraints and just use good ol' fashioned parenting. 

Have a mess around with it, and if you have any problems leave a comment here.

Euler Rotation Problems

Recently I've been having an issue when animating that a control will flip 180° or 360°. This usually occurs for me when I am matching FK/IK manually or animating a character turning around.

You can see the issue occuring here:

Very annoying - especially if to fix it you go in frame-by-frame. Fear not, there is an extremely handy and seemingly magical button in the graph editor called 'Euler filter'. It is located under Curves>Euler filter. Select the problem keyframes, hit this button and voila! Like magic, Maya interprets the information, and prevents any curves from exceeding 360°. Perfect.

Why this isn't a MASSIVE button outlined in red I don't know...