You can create floor contacts for your character’s hands and feet to make them collide with—rather than pass through—the floor surfaces you defined in your scene. Floor contacts allow your character’s hands and feet to react to the floor by stopping and bending the wrist, ankles, toes and fingers. By default, the scene grid is the floor surface, but you can also use floor contact planes to define new floor heights for your character’s hands or feet.
To create and adjust your floor contacts
All the floor contact attributes for your FBIK system appear. You can use these attributes to adjust all your character’s floor contact settings.
Turn on the appropriate floor contacts by typing on or 1 in the Hands or Feet Contact fields and then press .
In the Feet to Floor Contact Attributes or the Hand to Floor Contact Attributes sections, turn on the Hands or Feet Contact attributes.
For example, if you are creating floor contacts for your character’s feet, then you would turn on the Feet Contact attribute.
A set of hand or foot floor contact markers appear for the hands or feet of your character. By default, each floor contact marker set contains 12 markers (six markers for each hand or foot) for bipeds and 8 markers for quadrupeds (four markers for each paw or hoof).
Properly positioned floor contact markers | Attributes that control marker placement |
---|---|
1 |
Hand/Foot Height |
2 |
Hand/Foot Back |
3 |
Hand/Foot Middle |
4 |
Hand/Foot Front |
5 |
Hand/Foot In Side |
6 |
Hand/Foot Out Side |
Select the ankle or wrist effector for which you want to create a floor contact plane, and then select Skeleton > Full Body IK > Add Floor Contact Plane.
A floor contact plane for the selected effector appears. This plane determines a position in your scene beyond which the hands or feet affected by the floor contact markers cannot pass. By default, the floor height is 0 in the Y-axis and the scene grid is the hand and foot floor contact plane.
Floor contact planes are useful because they make it easy to animate your character walking across uneven terrain like stairs or a rocky surface. A surface can also be rotated and the character reacts appropriately.