Setting up the spine FK controls

00:03

You don't really want the IK controls being used

00:06

when the FK skeleton is active and vice versa.

00:11

Let's wire up the FK controls first as they are easier to do.

00:15

All we need them to do is drive the control spine's FK joints

00:20

back into the node editor.

00:22

Let's clear this

00:24

import the FK controls,

00:27

remove the shape nodes.

00:30

We now need the FK spine joints.

00:33

Let's find them

00:35

and bring them in.

00:37

And let's just organize these.

00:39

The FK A controls have zero values, which is exactly how we need them.

00:44

The joints however, have an offset on them.

00:46

So connecting the controls directly wouldn't work because the translate

00:51

Y value here would be replaced with the zero value.

00:56

This would make the joint move position

00:59

because these are the control joints and they're not driving the mesh directly.

01:04

We can again use the transform offset parent matrix attributes to help us.

01:10

Again, we can move the value from here

01:13

down here

01:15

and then set this back to zero.

01:18

So we now have clean values on the joints.

01:21

Let's update the other spine joints now.

01:24

So move the values down here.

01:28

Now we have the transforms zeroed out so they match the controls.

01:32

We can use a direct connection to drive them.

01:35

This is so much more efficient than using constraints or other nodes

01:40

just go through and connect the controls, rotate attribute to the FK joints,

01:45

rotate attribute

01:47

and also connect the translate attributes too

01:51

just to give a bit more flexibility.

01:54

I'll just work through the others.

01:58

You could also connect the scale attributes to if needed

02:01

and this will scale thoe joints.

02:05

So there we can now manipulate the FK spine with the controls.

02:10

And we didn't need to use constraints or other complex connections.

02:15

There's one more step we need to do before the FK spine is complete

02:20

at the moment, it works well. But if we try to move the cock control,

02:24

nothing happens.

02:26

The problem with using direct connections is they

02:28

rely on actual values being driven into them.

02:33

Even though we move the cot control. The Pelvis FK control is still set to zero.

02:38

So the FK joints aren't being told to move.

02:41

So we need to approach the Pelvis joint in a different way.

02:47

First select and delete the connection between it and the Pelvis FK control

02:53

instead

02:54

connect the controls world space zero attribute

02:59

to the Pelvis FK joints. Offset parent matrix attribute.

03:05

This is going to take the controls world position

03:07

and use that to drive the joint instead.

03:11

So now the spine is tilting forwards a little

03:14

just like we did with the main transform attributes.

03:17

We also need to zero out the joint orient down here.

03:23

Great. That's now corrected the spine and it's back in its original position

03:29

and everything now moves with the cock control.