William Harley

Hi, time_input and frame_input are global variables that you link to a custom variable name.
In this case Im setting the Key as 'time_input' and the var name to link 'my_time'
The my time parm input just has to be a float in your graph

Hi, You should learn both. Kinefx nodes are used for setting up skeletons, deforming curves and modeling, and procedural animation.
Apex is used to set up complex rigs that are performant with easy to use controls, primarily for character animation.

You can start with Apex rigging tutorials, you will find that kinefx is used quite a bit in them anyway so no need to
focus on it separately.

Hi,

1) There is a polyframe node, one after setting up the skeleton rotation and tags; and another after the merged geo for the model. For the one after the skeleton you have the tangentv enabled and the other it's unchecked. I'm trying to figure out the purpose of that.

This is used for better normal deformation in the bonedeform and for blendshapes, you only need the tangentu on the polyframe.

2) I noticed there is now a "configure joints" SOP. I don't see it having any impact anywhere in the rig unless I'm missing something.

This wont do anything at the moment, that is just me playing around with ideas on my side

3) At the end of the network with the "configurecontrols" I wanted to add some limits so the arms only moved up or down of back and forward, not sideways. I tried a bunch of different stuff, unchecking and checking options. I can't seem to lock down the transform on the z axis:

With Ik its very hard to limit the rotations as its a ik solve. The best thing you can do here is to limit the ik control to only move in the desired direction like I did here,


For the spring setup:
The helix is not available as a apex sop verb yet, but you can use a vex snippet in the graph to create the spring.
its worth noting that you will loose compatibility if you wanted to export this with other software, and you will be
adding unnecessary overhead in your graph which will see you get a bit of a performance hit.

As a general rule try and keep the rig clear from modeling operations, the rig has to rebuild the spring for every evaluation
which can cause slow downs if you decided to add say a 100 lamps to your scene