Setting up an IK/FK switch is fairly easy to do. Once you have your joint chain in the correct position you just need to duplicate it twice, these being your IK and FK chains. After creating the IK spline in the IK joints, you can then orient constrain both the IK and FK chains to the base chain. This creates the connect between all the joints, all that needs changing to switch between them is the weighting. By creating a locator or an object, you can use set driven keys to create a more accessible switch. The locator being the driver whilst the IK or FK weight, being the driven. I created this setup so that you are able to have a blend between IK and FK, so it's not just one or the other, this can give greater flexibility and allow for more control whilst making it easier to blend between the two. It can be hard to switch from IK to FK without a blend, the jump can be quite sudden and you have to make sure the hands or feet are in exactly the same place in either mode.
The new IK system in Maya comes with a built in switch where you can blend between IK and FK, this is good to know and could come in great use, but it's always useful to know how to do it the classic way, just in case anything goes wrong. There are a few things I need to work out on my switch, there is a bit of flipping in one of the joints when blended. I also need to figure out how to make the FK controls invisible when set to IK. You would connect the locator IKFK node to a condition node, under its first term within the hypershade, the problem I had with this was that Maya crashed every time I tried to do this. I'm not sure why but I will try it on another computer to see if it will work or not.
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