Posted April 24, 2021 by TwistedTwigleg
Hey everyone! I just wanted to write a development post explaining what is going on with the showcase project and the next version of Twisted IK 2.
The showcase project is coming along nicely! There is currently two working examples of how to use IK for a Spider with procedural animation in 3D, one with FABRIK and another with TwoBoneIK. Additionally, there is also a dino that uses FABRIK with procedural animation and jiggle for movement in the tail. There is also a work-in-progress humanoid with procedural animation, but it's not working just yet. Here's a link to a GIF showing the current state of the humanoid example: https://imgur.com/a/eSn8nVo
All of the examples currently are just for procedural animation for the legs of the characters. I feel this is the most common usecase for IK that I have seen, so I wanted to start the showcase project with that. The first release of the showcase project will focus on this, and later down the line I'll look at adding more examples to the showcase project.
For Twisted IK 2 itself, things are progressing smoothly! I was going to release the showcase project first, and then work on the next version, but as I have been working on the showcase project I have found some bugs and made some improvements, so the releases will be together.
Version 2.4.0 of Twisted IK 2 will have a new feature I'm very excited about: Physics bones in 3D can now be synced with Twisted Bone3D nodes! This allows for active ragdolls that are much more controllable! It can also allow for taking a baked animation and converting it into velocity and angular velocity, so it can push other physics objects in the world using the motion from the animation. I do not currently have an example to show, but when version 2.4.0 is released there will be a couple development example scenes showing how it works. I'll also explain a bit more about how it works then as well.
There are still some bugs that need to be worked out. Specifically, the TwoBoneIK used in the legs of the humanoid are not working. I think this is due to the algorithm, but so far I have not found where the bug is specifically. However, I am looking into this! I have been testing a new algorithm for TwoBoneIK and in 2D it seems to be working well, so I'm hopeful that it will work in 3D as well and fix the issues seen. I have also added some quality of life improvements, like adding a boolean to tell a modification stack to execute on _ready, so you can have IK execute when the scene starts without needing to have IK running in the editor. Unfortunately, it is taking a bit longer than I had hoped, so that's why this release is taking a bit longer than previous releases.
That's all for this update! Thanks for reading and I hope to release the next update soon.