What's the best way to do an IK rig for a stick figure?

Question

This is the tutorial I used for learning IK rigging. https://youtu.be/Q9f-WVs3ghI It's difficult to do this kind of rigging with stick figure legs, since they don't have feet and their legs are really close together in a t-pose. Is there a recommended way of rigging stick figure legs with inverse kinematics?

Answer 1

If you struggled with that tutorial, you might have a hard time with Rigify too, idk (Rigify is worth learning though, imo). But Blender has a built in Auto IK Feature; so you just add some bones, parent your mesh to the armature, then turn on the check box for "auto IK". You need to be in Pose Mode to see the option in the tools area, where ever the heck that is now, lol. GL OP (tools is the screwdriver/wrench icon in the properties panel, I think)

Answer 2

Using Addon "Rigify" might be the best way

It includes auto IK function,so you don't need to set the bones one by one

Answer 3

If you have legs without feet you can simply do it this way:

• Create your torso, thigh and shin, parent the thigh to the torso (Keep Offset mode)
• Create a target bone and a pole target bone, deparent them from the other bones, deactivate their Deform option.
• Give the shin an IK constraint, with the target bone as Target and with the pole target bone as Pole Target.
• If the shin bone rotates abnormally once in Pose mode, correct its Pole Angle in the constraint.
• To mirror the bones, select all in Edit mode and go in the Armature menu (3D view bottom menu bar) > Symmetrize.
• For the mesh parentage, if it doesn't work correctly With Automatic Weight, parent With Empty Groups, and assign the group to the vertices you want in the Properties panel > Data > Vertex Groups, or switch your armature to Pose mode, switch your mesh to Weight Paint mode, and begin to paint for each bone.