Better Solution for Dual Knee/Elbow Setup

It’s one of those ideas that pops up at 4 AM and makes you wonder… will it work?

Back in 2018, I got a model from a friend and started to learn to rig by watching Autodesk’s Character Rigging Series for Maya. Even though some methods might be outdated it’s still a good starting point for rigging. One method that bothered me most is having dual knee/elbow to swivel arm/leg with pole vector or with an attribute. For this, instructor duplicates arm joint chain twice, does the setup, then blends these auto/manual joint chains to the IK chain like you would do in an FK/IK/bind joint chain setup. It’s cumbersome but same thing can be achieved with 2 locators and a single pole vector constraint. It felt really good to see an idea working properly!

I stopped using this dual setup while writing my auto-rigger and it never occured to me use it but I’m posting this; hoping that it might be useful to someone.