Newbie question: rotating the forearm/wrist/hand in Blender

[rm7]

First, thank you for creating this application. As a software developer, I can appreciate the time that must be in this project.

I'm a complete newbie to 3D. I've managed to get to the point where I can take a model created in makehuman and import it into Blender. I can get my lighting and camera set the way I need it. Where I'm struggling is with posing. Specifically, I need to rotate the forearms of the default pose so that the hands are perpendicular to the ground instead of parallel. I've searched this forum, but I haven't found a specific answer to this problem, although this question is also posed here:

http://www.makehuman.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1898

I'm unfamiliar with some of the terms in that thread. I know that IK stands for inverse kinematics, but I really don't know what that means. I can select the object/bone (not sure what to call it) labeled LoArmIK_L, but when I rotate the forearm (using r y y) the hand doesn't move. That's just like the problem in the other thread. I can select other objects to make the hand move, but this causes very unrealistic twisting of the mesh. Can anyone point me to what I'm doing wrong? Thanks!

[rm7]

I was reading through this page http://sites.google.com/site/makehumandocs/blender-export-and-mhx/the-mhx-rig on Blender exporting and the MHX rig. It makes mention of the layers that various riggings are in. Right now, I have layers 1 and 2 and then a lot of "garbage" in 20. From reading other threads, that means that my import is getting errors. Are the rigs in these layers what I'm missing? Also, is this import issue expected? I'm not really sure what is known to be broken and what is supposed to be working.

[ThomasL]

By default the arms use the FK controls - the circles around the upper arms and forearms. To enable the IK controls, change the rig's ArmIk properties to 1. The properties are found in the user interface panel labelled MHX Drivers, to the right of the viewport. The user interface visibility is toggled on and off with N-key.

The documentation talks about bone layers, not object layers. The bone layers are found in the armature context (press the little stick man button). More conveniently, you can also control bone layer visibility from the user inteface panel MHX Layers, where the layers have names.

These panels are created by the MHX importer, so you need to have that enabled even if you don't plan to import new characters.