Rigging The Character

Following Matt’s tutorials I created a rig for my character. This was interesting for me as have previously watched and rigged characters in the past. Last time I used IK handles on most of the joints and then parented IK’s together. Matts method involves just IKing the legs and SKing the feet for the reverse heel joint. Matts reverse heel joint is also interesting as it uses less joints than the conventional one on the internet. It creates a nice walk movement on the foot however I believe the other version is easier to manipulate.

To rig my character I IK’ed one leg ad parented all the joints to each other in the order of anatomy. Eg. Wrist to elbow, elbow to shoulder… This is a much nicer method of rigging compared to my past attempts. Control points are added by creating nurb circles and centering them to each joint and constraining them. The contraints we mainly used was orient and point, this gives the user the ability to easily move the joints and control them using the controllers rather than the actual joint. We had too controllers of the hip joint, one to rotate one to move. One thing I learnt is that while rigging you MUST freeze transformations on everything! I had countless problems later on due to this problem. To test this, select your whole model and 0 everything, if it does not return to its default position its not all frozen. On my model I added every controls such as neck and jaw. I also added some in the claws, these extras just add more controls and help with such animations as screaming, they also add more details in the walk if you can see the model breathing or clenching its claws.