Rigging, My current class

so this month I am taking Rigging. What rigging consists of is placing joints inside of a skeleton so that you can move the model around. With the picture I am showing, there is a skin layer outside of this skeleton but I have it hidden so that you can see the joints clearer. I am further along in this process so these pics aren't what you would start with but kind of in the middle before the advanced rig that i'm working on right now.


this is the skeleton just relaxed. You're most likely wondering why there are letters and arrows around the skeleton. The S stands for shoulders and it's the icon that an animator can select if he/she wishes to move the clavicle, scapula, arm bones, etc. when you click on the S, it makes all of these moveable at once. Just as the other icons which i will show in a minute to give you a better idea of how things work in rigging.

I just translated this up in the Y axis. if you notice the shoulders move along with the clavicle and scapula. The way that this works is that the rig is built up of an hierarchy chain. first the child, then the parent. so when you want something to drive something else or one to take dominance over the other, you use the hierarchy. Simple example is if you move your shoulder. If you watch it, what is moving along with it? your ulna, radius, hand, and your scapula and clavicle. so it makes sense why we would create a control that drives all of these. the shoulder bone is parented to the left clavicle IK handle. The IK is used for rotation. i'll keep it simple. (still following along?)

so what i did here is move the arrow icon. I parented the eyes to follow the icon, but however there is something else parented to the icon as well, these are called locators.


If you notice the highlighted objects, these are the locators. The eyes would be the child and the locators the parent. Hopefully that makes sense. So the locators are the child to the arrow icon, and the arrow icon the parent. That way I can either select the arrow icon and the locators will tag along due to being the child of the parent, or I can move the locators individually and the eyes will follow because they are the children to the locators....make sense? I hope so. It's really just logic if you think about it. Anatomy plays a role a little bit in helping figure out what should be the parent of what.

This is an example of what an IK does. The purple surface is where I attached the IK handle to.


As you can see it allows me to bend the arm in a certain fashion, but if you look at the V icon in the background, that is there to allow me to translate up or down in the y axis as well as constrain my elbow so my rig doesn't break....an example is that you can only twist your arm so far because it stops, adding a pole vector constraint to the arm keeps is from going crazy.

What I was thinking about doing for anyone who's interested is recording a little bit of me fiddling around with the rig so you can get the idea of what's going on. If you have read this far, please leave a comment letting me know if you would like to see a little youtube video of me moving the parts around and I will record and upload it. I'll record a 30 sec to a min clip just kind of explaining how things move around. Plus its a good refresher for me = )


that's all for now, back to studying.