[HELP] Creating IK Handles

[panagiotisbaxevanos]

Version: Maya 2015

Hey guys, I am new to Maya trying to learn on a model that was rigged by a friend. This is all purely for educational purposes to teach myself and work within a personal Zelda remake project in Unreal Engine. Needless to say I am a noobie in animation and have been studying on it heavily the past 2 months as I want to creating my own customer player pawn. I am however running into an issue creating IK handles to assist in animation. I get the following error when trying to create Rotate-Planar Solver IK Handles (I read for legs, arms, spine, and neck this is the best option) "// Error: line 1: The selected items must be from the same skeletal chain." *Pictured below* I am trying to go from the joint at the hip to his toes and from his collar to his wrists to assist in easier animation. Any clue what I can change in the skeletal chain, or can someone explain what this error means? Any good resources or videos on this process would be heavily appreciated! I included some pics attached to show the skeletal chain for the parts I mentioned. I've spent hours trying to figure this out 😞

Thank you all for taking the time to read :)!

[Cagetron]

The rotate-plane ik handle will be good for arms and legs, but probably not for the spine and neck.  Think of this Ik chain as operating on 3 joints that make up a triangle.  For example, the shoulder, elbow, then wrist make up a 3 joint triangle where the wrist is the end effector.  To make the Ik for the arm you would pick the IK handle tool, then select the shoulder joint, then the wrist joint.  That will give you a basic IK handle that you can translate around to control the arm.  Typicallly you then build more rigging on top of that foundation for additional control, such as a pole vector contraint or a control to translate and rotate the wrist.