Hi, I'm giving the new built-in Electra rig a shot and I have a couple of questions.

1) Is it possible to disable stretchy IK?
2) How to I enable FK for the arms? I don't see a switch anywhere.
3) I noticed the version of Electra on the Content Library has totally different control names. Is it the same rig?
4) Is there a way to hide body parts, like only see the bottom of the body while doing a walk cycle?

Thanks!

1. yes but you will need to edit the rig, on the content library rig is disabled by default
I've attached an example on how to do it on the built-in Electra

2. there are abstract controllers called L/R_Arm_abst that can be blended between 0 and 1 on the content library electra. the built-in test geometry Electra has only ik arms

3. no

4. I answered here [www.sidefx.com] For just hiding controllers you can use selection sets

Great, thanks for the answers! That's too bad about the arms, if anything I wish they would have defaulted to FK-only.

Quick follow-up question: I have since started using the Selection Set pane, it is sooooo much nicer of a user experience than the small floating one in the viewer. Is there any way to script it? It would be really neat to have a hot key to cycle through my selection sets, like one button to cycle through isolating "legs" then "arms" then "torso" etc.

Not that I know, but if I had to guess it would be probably be scripted something like This [www.sidefx.com]. with apex.ui

I haven't had a chance to try apex.ui yet (I can't find the documentation on the website and I'm a little rusty on figuring using Python APIs without documentation)... but I did want to mention that I was able to position the arms in a psuedo-FK-like manner by using Ctrl + Shift as mentioned here:

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/character/kinefx/animatestate.html#transformcontrols [www.sidefx.com]

So, maybe that is why there is no FK/IK switch... in order to get people to try this mode. It is fine for posing but not so great for animating as it has all the regular problems of IK (much harder to get good arcs, more complicated curves in the graph editor, etc.)

IK/FK switching requires some added rigging flexibilities so it is still yet to come. However, expect it in the next major release.