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.