You can quickly and easily create natural looking poses and animation for your biped and quadruped characters with full body IK (FBIK) in Maya.
Instead of using single IK handles per limb, full body IK allows you to translate and rotate your character’s body parts with FBIK effectors and have the rest of your character’s body follow those movements. For example, if you use FBIK to animate the arm of a biped character reaching down to pick up an object off the floor, your character will bend in a natural way at the waist and knees as you move your character’s FBIK hand effectors downward. You can also use FBIK to animate movements such as: a character swinging by its arms from a tree branch, a character doing a handstand, a character’s walk cycle, and so on.
Maya's full body IK is based on the Autodesk® HumanIK® solver used in Autodesk® MotionBuilder®. FBIK utilizes the full capabilities of the HumanIK solver so that you can use the various hikHandle attributes to tweak the motions of your characters during interaction and playback when animating with FBIK.
