Pin and unpin your character’s effectors

You can use pinning to hold or limit the movements of your character’s body parts when posing with FBIK. Pinning allows you to lock the translation or rotation channels of specific effectors; so that when you move unpinned body parts, the pinned body parts do not follow. For example, you can pin a character’s foot effectors in translation and rotation when posing a walk cycle to prevent foot sliding.

When you first create the FBIK effectors for your character, by default, your character’s feet are pinned in translation and rotation and your character’s hands are pinned in translation. This prevents your character’s limbs from being moved or dragged when you move the rest of the body.

Note

Pinning is not a constraint. Pinning only restricts the movements of your effectors during interaction. If you want an a body part to stay in place during playback, then you need to set an IK key on that body part’s FBIK effector and FK joints.
Do not pin your finger or toe effectors, as pinning these effectors has no effect on the FBIK solution.

You can set the Pinning attribute on each FBIK effector to the following states: unpinned, pinTranslate, pinRotate, or pinAll. You can set the pinning states of your FBIK effectors from the Channel Box, the effector’s marking menus, or by using the +w (pin translation), +e (pin rotation), or +s (pin translation and rotation) hotkeys.

Pinning states

unpinned

When a FBIK effector is unpinned, movement in other areas of the body can affect or change the translation and rotation of the unpinned effector.

pinTranslate

When a FBIK effector is pinned in translation, movement in other areas of the body can only affect or change the effector’s rotations.

By default, the LeftHandEff and RightHandEff are pinned in translation.

pinRotate

When a FBIK effector is pinned in rotation, movement in other areas of the body can only affect or change the translation of the effector.

pinAll

When a FBIK effector is pinned in translation and rotation, movement in other areas of the body can not affect or change the effector’s transformations.

By default, the LeftFootEff and RightFootEff are pinned in both translation and rotation.

How do I use pinning when animating with FBIK?

When animating with FBIK, you should use pinning anytime you want to keep part of your character still while posing or when you want to isolate the orientation and position of one or more body parts while repositioning the rest of the character.

Example: Pinning your character’s effectors

Pin the feet of your character during a walk cycle.
Pin the knees and hands of a character as it crawls on the floor.
Pin the feet and hands of a character as it is holding a railing while climbing stairs.
Pin the hips, wrists and feet (when needed) of a character as it is reaches over a desk.