IK vs FK part 1

I have been studying the nature of IK and FK chains to study which one does better at what kind of movement in animation. Here are few simple observations that I wanted to note down.

FK Advantages:

1. The greatest advantage I see with FK is ease in achieving overlapping action, e.g. between upper arm and forearm.
2. Natural Arcs while interpolating between keys.
3. When elbow is planted or when we just need to move forearm then FK is easier.
   

IK Advantages:

1. The best thing about IK is the simplicity it offers in creating a pose. For example, positioning a hand with IK is very intuitive and predictable.
   (With FK, I believe the problem is that you have to think in terms of two rotation transforms to make hand reach a goal position. Also, Euler rotation introduces a certain level of difficulty if axes are not in proper alignment, i.e. two axes are closer to each other.)
2. Animators have to deal less with Euler rotations, hence less Gimbal lock problems.

I understand that many times FK or IK is a personal preference. So a particular behavior of FK/IK may be difficult for one person, but easier for another. But my goal here is to list mainly logical advantages of each system.

Dedicated to "Hello world!"

Any programming language learning is incomplete without a nice "Hello world!" program. It is a different kind of joy when you start learning programming and see this program for the first time. And hence I am dedicating my first post to this program, "Hello world!".

I want to use this blog as my notepad to share ideas on rigging and any kind of technology related with character animation and art. I love to do character animation, but I feel that there is a huge scope for improvement in digital animation tools. One of my main areas of interest is the interactive nature of digital puppets. I want to improve this interaction to bring the most intuitive experience for animators (including me) to create art. And lately I have been falling in love all over again with mathematics. I find Math to be artistic in some ways because you can represent a lot of phenomena in life by mathematical notations. It's an arguable concept, but that's why I am saying I find it art only to an extent.