Optional module - Maxon Computer

172 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA
With these difficulties in mind, what if you could simply grab the hand and move it to where you want it with
the rest of the arm moving itself to follow the hand? This is what IK allows you to do. Instead of rotating the
individual joints one by one and working down the chain, you have an “effector” located near the hand that
you can move to control the movement of the entire IK chain in one go.
In this chapter, we‘ll create an IK chain for our turtle from the previous chapter so that we can then animate
it using IK. Open the file “QS_Joints_Final.c4d” or, if you’re carrying on from the previous tutorial, feel free to
use the result of that tutorial as your starting point.
Another key feature in MOCCA 3 is the super fast IK setup. You select the joints, call the IK Chain tool and that’s
it — the arm is ready to animate using IK! You no longer need to go through a long process of setting targets,
constraints and so on. In the case of the arm, it’s ready to animate in just two steps.
Now it‘s time to get started. Hold down the Ctrl key and select the joints ”shoulder”, “hand” and “Joint.3”. Hold
down the Ctrl key again and choose Character/IK Chain in the main menu while pressing the CTRL-key. That’s it
for now! The Object Manager should look as shown in the next screenshot.
Before we carry on working with the arm, we should switch to the perspective view so that we can see the arm
in three dimensions (Cameras/Perspective).
You’ll find two new objects at the top in the Object Manager: “Joint.3.Goal” and “hand.Goal”. Select both
objects (Ctrl) and make sure that the Model tool is selected in the left toolbar. Select the Move tool in the
top toolbar. Zoom the window as needed to get a good view of the arm and move the object axis around in
the editor. The hand moves around and the rest of the arm follows it. It is not even necessary to set the Pole
Vector to make the elbow bend correctly. However, in order to have control over the elbow we will still set a
Pole Vector ().
To do this, select the “shoulder” joint’s IK tag