I'm trying to setup a CAT rig so that I can animate clips for unreal 4. The workflow I'm trying to achieve is to have 1 clip per layer in the CAT rig. Everything is almost working perfectly but there are still a few problem. This is on 3ds Max 2015.
1. The IK target for the hand is at the end of the hand (where the fingers start) instead of at the start of the bone (where the actual wrist is). This is not a big issue but if there is a way to make the bone align to the IK target instead of making the bone "lookat" the IK target, I would like to know it. I have tried to use orientation constraints to achieve this result but not only does it gets tedious to make sure all layers have the constraints, but the whole thing gets very laggy after 4 layers with the constraint.
I would like to have the IK target on the left of the green box (where the bone starts), not on the right (where the bone ends).
2.The hands are shaking whenever I am using the IK targets. This is a strange bug and I can't find out what is happening. The CAT bones of the hands seem to have a noise on them whenever the IKs move them. The shaking seems to correlate with the length of the hands.
As you can see in this next picture, the green bone is significantly longer than than the pink bone.
To illustrate the shaking problem, I linked a line and a point to each hand bone, and I turned on the trajectory on the point. The distance accentuates the shaking, which is clearly visible on the pink point. Both IK targets move the same distance upward with absolutely no rotation. The pink side is a lot worse because the hand bone is a lot shorter, but the green side still has some undesired shaking.
The shaking is also affected by the position of the FK bones when the IK is being used. I have replicated the same problem with default CAT rigs that come with 3ds Max.
I also need to animate arms in a first person perspective and the smallest movements can ruin everything. I could set "Num IK bones" to 2 so that the hands are always controlled by the FK bone, but I see no reasons for the shaking to occur, and I prefer to work with the IK controls. As noted before, orientation constraints aren't very effective.