Hello, I wonder if someone can help me understand what's best practice for using Maya rigged FBX's. Once imported, the bones show a hierarchical structure where the nulls are actually parented to each other, while the *real* bone nodes are children of the related nulls. In this condition, I found no way to even create an IK chain, because the procedure complains about the bones not being parented to each other. So question is… am I missing something or usually rig has to be redone or heavily rearranged? I mean, there is no way to use an existing FBX as is?

Thanks for any suggestion.

FBX does not support IK. So it is Maya that is destroying your nice IK rig, upon export. There is no IK transport file type, that exists, AFAIK.

What I do, is use the Search icon to search, by type and choose the NULL type. After I have selected them all, I enable their visibility flag. I do the opposite for bones, I select them all and turn off their visibility flag. Then you are left with a rig that has a bunch of control spheres. Just keyframe the spheres, how you like, or use mocap to bind movement to the rig.

Thanks for the reply Enivob. But still, how would I go and create an IK in Houdini dealing with the null nodes? I mean, the IK should be created on bones (if they are in hierarchy which is not what comes from an imported FBX), and then handled through nulls/control spheres. Hence my question about how you guys deal with that.

Hi, how do you solved this problem? Exactly the same problem here. The bones are not in a hierarchy, instead the NULLS are, but we cannot apply IK on NULLS.

JiaxiLiu
Hi, how do you solved this problem? Exactly the same problem here. The bones are not in a hierarchy, instead the NULLS are, but we cannot apply IK on NULLS.

I didn't. I switched to Blender.

In Houdini 18.5, this should be doable with KineFX.