Full body IK (FBIK) lets you create natural poses and animation for your characters. Instead of using single IK handles for each limb, full body IK lets you translate and rotate a character’s body parts with FBIK effectors and make the rest of the 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 naturally at the waist and knees as you move your character’s FBIK hand effectors downward. You can also use FBIK to animate character movements such as swinging from a tree branch, doing a handstand, a walk cycle, and so on.

Maya's FBIK 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. The Autodesk^® FBX^® plug-in and file interchange format allows you to transfer rigged characters animated with FBIK between Maya and MotionBuilder without requiring the animation to be baked.