IK Dynamic

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IK Dynamic allows to create procedural animation aimed at rigid body multi-legged characters and biped characters.

It uses the IK Dynamic Geometry Nodes node group to achieve procedural animation.

A documentation is available to provide further guidance on the usage of IK Dynamic.

https://greenjadeleaf.github.io/ik-dynamic/

Create procedural animation with ease!

Select the bones to animate and click Create Armature Link.

Only an IK rig needed!

Tweak the animation to your liking!

Tweak settings to change the procedural animation!

Bake the animation!

Save your procedural animation with baking!

It is possible to use the native Blender bake animation operator or use the IK Dynamic bake animation operator.

Procedural animation.

To understand the key feature of IK Dynamic, we have to define the following methods of animation: keyframe based animation and procedural animation.

Keyframe based animation is where an animator will create key poses for a character to follow whereas procedural animation is a method of animating without explicitly creating key poses but instead using algorithms to drive the animation.

IK Dynamic provides a method of procedural animation.

It does not only use parameters but also empty objects as controllers for the character to follow. The character will try to place its feet on a specified ground object.

Direct and indirect procedural animation.

Direct animation where the character will be attached to an animated controller.

Indirect animation where the character will try to follow an animated controller.

The key benefits are a reduced workload as there are less things to animate and the ease of tweaking and iterating the result.

Instead of animating the legs manually, the legs will procedurally calculate their position on the ground object.

Disclaimer:

While procedural animations can be quite useful, it comes at the trade-off of fine-tuning the animation quite heavily to get the expected result. It may be more worthwhile to use keyframed or motion capture animation depending on the use scenario.

IK Dynamic relies on a Geometry Nodes node group which is not designed for the purpose of animating the pose of armatures. IK Dynamic will have some quirks of usage.

IK Dynamic is resource intensive. To get a real-time preview, a fast computer is needed, more tips to improve performance can be found in the documentation. It is always possible to enable the simulation cache to get a preview which will not be real-time.

Notes:

The characters are not included.

Changelog:

0.0.1, 0.0.2, 0.0.3, 0.0.3a:

Initial release

1.0.0:

Initial release with Geometry Nodes