Post 4 - Arm Rig

With the leg rig complete, we have now moved onto creating a rig for an arm, though this time instead of just creating the rig as it is, we will be attaching it to a modelled arm so that the rig has a purpose, and moves the arm realistically.

First we loaded up the zoe model we used previously in the spine rig and like in that exercise, got the model into the centre of the scene and deleted history along side freezing the transformation.
Then I began to create the actual joints of the arm, again thinking of where I will need the joints to bend. Below is a picture of the outcome as well as the outliner once I had renamed each of the joints correctly.

I then created an IK handle from the top of the arm to the wrist so that the arm can bend realistically. To then control this IK properly I made a controller and put it around the wrist, and once cleaning its history etc I orient constrained it to the wrist IK. This then allowed me to move the hand around and bend the arm with the controller.

With the rig now ready to go I connected it to the mesh by selecting them both and going onto skin - bind skin - smooth bind options in the Animation tab. In the options menu I changed some things that was shown to us in a presentation and applied.

 With the arm mesh now connected to the rig its nearly finished, we just need to look out how the skin looks when its moved and if any cleaning up needs to be done.

As you can see, the bend of the arm just deforms the polygons instead of moving how a real arm should. So to fix this I will be using the Paint skin weights tool and hopefully making it seem more natural.

Here is the arm once I had used the skin weights tool for a while and got used to it, but I didnt find it too hardly thankfully and Im happy with the way the arm now bends.

Spine Rig

Continuing with the character rig, we then moved onto the spine and this time used a character model along side the joints for shape and proportion. 

Before starting anything though I made sure the model was in the centre of the work space and that all her history was deleted followed by freezing the transformation.

I then created a basic leg rig as I have in the past, duplicated it and added an extra joint as a pelvis which I connected both the leg joints to.

Then came creating the spine using the joint tool, making sure I had points for the major parts of articulation. I then connected this to the pelvis.

Next I created a control around the waist and snapped its pivot to the origin point of the pelvis.I then froze the transformation and renamed it to root_control. 

I then next selected the root joint (pelvis) and created two groups, one being the waist control and one being the root control.

For the waist control I moved the pivot to the lower spine joint and for the root control I moved the pivot to the pelvis.

I created another controller to go around the waist which would actually become the waist control and parented that to the waist control group.

The final step was to create 3 arrow controlls that would control the 3 parts of the spine. Once lining them up alongside the spine, I orient constrained each one to their ajacent joint and parented them to each other from the top control down. 

These are next parented to the waist control and then to finish off we Parent all the controls to the Root control.