Rigging the skeleton..

After receiving the textured skeleton models I had to create the skeleton that would be used to control the geometry. I created the humanoid skeleton in a similar way to previous projects, heres a breakdown of what was used. Creating the skeleton in the right view ports within Maya helped to make sure the skeleton was perfectly straight otherwise this would result in the geometry deforming badly. I used the joint tool to create the joints, to form a minimal rig. The hands and most other features were made with minimal joints to match the reduced model.

It was essential that the joints in the skeleton hierarchy were named correctly as in the next step I would be adding in the controls to move each joint. This is done in the Outliner in Maya.

 Adding the controls to the skeleton will allow to move the geometry without having to move each joint. The joints will be parented together through the Outliner to allow them to move correctly and follow each other. The controls are made from NURBS circles and are purely to control the rig during the animating stage. I added contraints to the different controls to specify which joint they will be controlling and how they will control it, either its rotation or translation. With the elbow for example it only moves in the y rotation as the model will be acting as a human skeleton should. Therefore there is only a constraint in that variable within Maya. Orient constraints were added to the rest of the relative controls as well as knee controls made from Locators which will allow the knees to be moved during animation. A master control was placed at the bottom that is parented to the rest of the rig, and is used to move and scale the controls and skeleton proportionally. Once into Unity the skeleton will have to scale with the geometry to prevent problems with animating. Putting each element into different layers within Maya as, Geometry, Skeleton and Controls, made the process easier to follow. Allowing me to hide certain elements while working on the skeleton.
Once the controls worked correctly the geometry could be binded to the skeleton using the smoothbind function. This then attaches these two elements together, however another process is needed called weight painting.

Weight painting is used to set how much influence each joint has on its surrounding geometry. Using the paint tool i painted the weight until the model geometry did not distort. It was helpful to put the model in extreme positions to see the distortion more clearly. The sword distorted very badly initially, so I solved this by making the wrist have full influence on the sword.