Prepare an existing skeleton for HumanIK

Before you can use the Characterization Tool to map the bones in your character's skeleton to the nodes understood by the HumanIK solver, you must set up your character in a basic T-stance that provides HumanIK with crucial information about the proportions of your character's skeleton and its joint transforms.

Your character's T-stance must match the description and example given below as closely as possible in order for the inverse kinematics and retargeting solvers to produce accurate results for your character. Without a properly configured T-stance, the solvers will base all of their operations on faulty data, and will likely produce skewed, awkward or unexpected poses.

The T-stance has the following requirements:

The character must face along the positive direction of the Z axis.
The arms must be spread along the X-axis. The left arm should therefore be pointing along the positive direction of the X-axis.
The top of the character's head must be up, in the positive direction of the Y-axis.
The character's hands should be flat, palms facing the ground, with the thumbs parallel to the X axis.
The character's feet can be perpendicular to the legs (with the toes pointing along the Z-axis as shown), or they can continue along the orientation of the legs (with the toes pointed straight down). The feet must not be rotated around the Y-axis (meaning the toes of the left foot should not point inward toward the right leg or outward away from the right leg).

A typical T-stance is shown in the following image:

NoteFor additional information on the specific bone structure required for HumanIK, see HumanIK character structure.

Quadrupeds

HumanIK can be used to control quadrupeds as well as bipeds. If you are creating a characterization for a quadruped character, you must set up the character's skeleton in the same T-stance shown above. Although this biped T-stance is awkward for a quadruped, you must set up your character in this biped stance in order to ensure that HumanIK is correctly set up with the proportions of your character's skeleton.