We'll go to the Skeleton menu, and choose IK Handle Tool options, and I'm going to choose the Rotate-Plane Solver option. So I'm gonna switch back to the perspective view and we'll create some IK controls for this character's leg. And these types of controllers are also very useful for certain animations for hands as well, when the character needs to plant on a surface, so they definitely come up a lot in the rigging process. So this is exactly the sort of controller we need to lock down the legs for this character. So the child joint is the priority object and the parent joints are receiving their rotation based on that movement. But if we add an IK handle to this joint chain, and I'll talk about doing this in detail in just a second, you can see that the rotation of the top two joints is now being controlled and driven entirely by the position of the child joint. So a joint chain, by default, has FK behavior. I'll switch to the side view, and create a joint chain. IK is an Inverse Kinematics control, which prioritizes the position of a child object over the rotation values of the parent in the hierarchy. IK is just the opposite of an FK control. So for these elements, we're going to create a different kind of control called an IK control. They create nice, organic arcs, and they can convey the sense of overlap in animation really effectively, but they are not useful for pinning down portion of the character, and the legs of a character definitely need to be planted and not slip on the ground as the character is animated in a walk cycle. FK controls are great for certain types of actions. We're gonna have to handle the controls for the feet a little bit differently, though. I'll just choose Constrain, Parent, and it'll make the connection so that I can move the entire leg around and also rotate it. In this case, I'm actually going to use a constraint that will connect the position and rotation of the joint to the controller. This is set up exactly the same way as I've handled the ears, head, and neck, and I'm just going to connect this control to the appropriate joint. So I've just got another control with an offset. So in reality, an animal like this probably would not be able to shift this area too much, but I'm going to add a control in this area just to make sure that the animator has the ability to pose the leg with a lot of freedom. For the character's shoulder area, I really wanna make sure the animator has maximum control of movement, especially since this character is small and kinda compact and also cartoony. It's just like the ones that we've done for the character's head and neck. And we're going to tackle most of that using a type of control called an IK Solver, but first I want to add one more FK, Forward Kinematics control. In this lesson, we're going to be building controls for the character's front legs.

Advanced skeleton maya rig too small