How to make a head IK / make the head tracking a moving target

[Aisu Uchibi 146]

In this post, I'll show you how to make a head IK to make the tracking of a moving object easier (however, it'll not affect the body).

 

First, we'll open Modelbench and a character, I'll use the base model of Steve to show you.

When opened, we'll add two parts to the model, both of them will be on the body section of our character :

- the first one, named "neck" here, will have the position of the head (Y : 12 in our case) and a rotation angle at -90°

- the second one, named "rotation angle head IK" here, will be on top of the head (Y : 19 in our case but can be set higher)

When this 2 parts will be set, we'll move the "head" part in the "neck" part and set his Y position at 0 to don't have a floating head and a rotation at -90° to avoid breaking a neck, this also allow to don't have a head bending. We can also put a block on the "rotation angle head IK" part but it's not necessary, it's just here to help visualize.

The organisation will look like this at the end :

The different position and rotation of each new and modified parts :

   

And my little Steve now look like this :

He has a lil' blue hat.  :3

 

Now that all our needed parts and modifications are done, we can start to make the head IK.

We'll only need to modify the "neck" part here. Open the bend section.

And activate the "X axis", we will not touch the range set at -180° / 180°.

Now, we'll go to the end of this section and put the part at "Lower", the "Joint offset" at -1 and the "Joint end" at 1. I choosed "Lower" because the neck has a rotation at -90° and the "Joint" parameters at -1 and 1 to make the collision part as close as possible.

Now, we can save our model and it's done !!

 

Now come the part where I explain you how to use it in Mine-Imator 2.0.0, open MI and load your model in it with a cube or any other object. Open the "neck" part

we added earlier and the "Inverse kinematics" on the "CONSTRAINTS" section.

We'll then choose the thing we want to track, here the cube, and set the "Angle target" on the "rotation angle head IK" part we created earlier.

 

And now, you can play with it.

Have fun !!  :3

[Pickyduck14 75]

NICE! i never thought about adding this to my animations!