Autodesk HumanIK

Autodesk HumanIK
Autodesk® HumanIK® animation middleware is a runtime solution for creating believable, interactive character animation for games. HumanIK enhances animation systems by enabling characters to interact and procedurally adapt to game environments. With less gameplay constraints, HumanIK brings games to life with more immersive 3D character animation experiences.

Detailed Features
Full-Body Inverse Kinematics
Solving
The powerful inverse kinematics (IK) solver in Autodesk® HumanIK® middleware alters existing forward-kinematics animations so they are better synchronized with the current state of the character and game. The middleware gives developers the potential to create complex character animation on the fly—by simply translating and rotating Effectors (target points) and changing their customizable parameters.

Full-Body IK
HumanIK delivers solutions based on “full-body” inverse kinematics solving. This means that the entire body contributes to the placing of joints: rotation as well as translation. The result is mechanically correct movement of the whole body, created at runtime, that appears natural to the viewer.

Low Level of Detail Solvers
Implementations of HumanIK software’s solvers use a lower level of detail (LOD), offering faster solving and reduced central processing unit (CPU) consumption.

Degrees of Freedom (DOF)
Users can set limits on the rotation of each node in their HumanIK character around each axis, restricting the range of movement of a character’s joints.

Oriented Floor Contact
The HumanIK floor contact engine helps to adjust a character’s feet and hands to the surfaces of oriented planes, such as ramps and walls, as well as flat floors.

Support for Inverse Joints
HumanIK supports characters with elbows and knees that bend backward, such as birds.

Maximum Extension Angles for Knees and Elbows
Users can set the maximum angle of extension for a character’s knees and elbows to values up to 180 degrees.

Retargeting
Animation retargeting enables game developers to alter clips on the fly, helping to fit them to characters of different scale and proportion. It streamlines the animation pipeline by reducing the number of preset forward kinematics clips that animators need to create and keep up to date.

Squash ’n’ Stretch
Squash ’n’ Stretch increases the realism of the poses generated by the retargeting solver by preserving the angular configurations of a character’s arms and legs.

Improved Knee Response to Ankle Rotations
When a character’s left or right ankle is rotated, the HumanIK inverse kinematics solver now automatically updates the rotation applied to the character’s knee to make the knee follow the orientation of the character’s foot.

Website:
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