What’s New in Release 4.5

Retargeting Reach for fingers and toes

You can now control how closely the final positions of your target character’s fingers and toes must match the positions of the corresponding digits in the source character. New properties have been added to the Property Set State to control the Reach Translation amount for each digit.

See the properties from HIKReachActorLeftHandThumbId to HIKReachActorRightFootPinkyId, under Retargeting-Specific Properties.

Re-organization of plug-in projects

The Visual Studio projects for the 3ds Max, Maya and MotionBuilder plugins have been removed from the samples\humanik\samples.sln solution and collected in a new solution, samples\humanik\HIKPlugIns.sln.

For the MotionBuilder plug-ins, the project naming has also been clarified, and support added for 64-bit Windows platforms. See also MotionBuilder HumanIK Solver Plug-in.

New Characterization Tool and characterization workflow

This release of HumanIK introduces a new workflow for creating characterizations for the characters you want HumanIK to control at runtime. You no longer need to set up your characters with their T-stances programmatically. Instead, your artists or riggers can use the new Characterization Tool to construct the characterization visually in a graphical interface, then export the characterization to binary files. You can then stream these binary files into memory at runtime using your own file management system, and create fully characterized and ready-to-use HIKCharacter objects from the contents of the files.

The Characterization Tool is available as a plug-in for Autodesk Maya® and Autodesk Softimage®. It is also available as a standalone application that can create characterizations from the contents of an FBX file, to support other content creation tools.

For details on this new characterization workflow, see Characterizing an HIKCharacter Visually.

Squash ’n’ Stretch improvements

The HumanIK Squash ’n’ Stretch solver can now affect all joint chains in the body: legs, arms, spine and neck. New character properties have been introduced to control the ability of each limb to compress and to expand, the overall contribution of the Squash ’n’ Stretch solver to the generated pose.

See Using Squash 'n' Stretch.

Propagating roll extraction from roll Node

Roll rotations that have been extracted from a shoulder, elbow, hip or knee and applied to the child roll Node can now be extracted from the roll Node and applied to the next Node in the hierarchy. This can help achieve a better skinning on the limb.

See Using Roll Extraction.

Determining joint inversions

You can use the new HIKIsJointInverted() function to determine whether a character’s knees and elbows bend like a normal human’s, or whether their bending directions are inverted.

See Reversing Knees and Elbows.