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IK Knee/Elbow Lock Help

Hello

I am trying to add a channel in my character’s leg and arm components to prevent the IK from bending. Something like ‘Leg Lock’ or ‘Arm Lock’. As in, I want the animator to be able to move the character’s wrist/ankle control in IK with ‘Max Stretch’ set to 1.0 (so no stretchy IK outwards), and preventing any sort of knee or elbow bend if I move the control towards the center of the character.

It’s more like I want the elbow/knee joints to be locked to 0.0 rotations somehow, does anyone have a way to achieve this? Of course I can lock the joints rotations themselves in the attribute editor but that doesn’t prevent the IK from bending.

I am aware of the Elbow Ref feature where it pins the elbow to a certain space, that sort of works but is not really the functionality I’m after.

Hi welcome,

It sounds like you’re describing FK. Any reason not to just use FK? Or you could use a simple Control_01 as a space switch for your IK control.

I’m rigging a Gorilla, yes FK is the simplest solution.

I think that we want to get some use out of the existing IK features like the nice Roll, Slide, Softness etc channels that come with the component. One day I’m going to add a ball roll to the hands which will be nice for animators but won’t necessarily work with FK…

I tried a few distance related solutions and also what you suggested with another Control to just space switch but it wasn’t 100% what I was looking for. I’ll keep at it for now

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do you have an approach on how to achieve hand roll functionality?