Rigging/controls...

Now I can move onto making the skeleton. Using the joint tool I created the skeleton and then made a heirachy within the Outliner that was sensible to allow me to label and locate my character's joints within the Geometry. The use of Layers during this process was very useful to concentrate on certain parts of the model, also speeding up workflow.

Originally I had created just one joint between the second spine joint and the head. I later corrected this with a neck joint to allow for a neck control, to animate the head. I also added a HIP dislocate joint, then snapped its position to the ROOT joint to allow for the hips to wobble.

The next stage was to create the IK handles for the legs and feet. Single chain (SC) and Rotate plane RP IK handles were used from the HIP to the ANKLE joint. SC handles were made for both feet from in this order ANKLE>BALL>TOE. Once this was complete I could manually move my model to check if the handles were working as a normal skeleton should.

I could then create the controls for the IK handles to allow me to animate the character without individually moving the handles themselves. Using NURBS circles I made the controllers correspond to each joint. Then parented them in a heirachy to allow for the controls to work using each separate joint movement together.

With the added joint for the neck I added an additional control for the neck. I limited each controllers movement of each joint, as not all movements will be need on all of the joints. Using the Constrain menu I used Orient and Parent constrains for all of the controls e.g. the elbow will only be moving in Y axis therefore all other axis and translations will be blocked.

The master control on the floor was added to scale and move the character to allow for easy scene placement.

Foot controls were added using the Curve tool, the same method was used for the hand controls.

Once I had checked that the skeleton worked well, I applied a Smooth Bind to attach the rig with the model. Now the model can be moved with the controllers that are applied to the rig. I now have to check for any displacement in the model once the skeleton is moved. Using the weight painting tool I can now set the influence that each joint has on the model. For example from the hip i only want it to influence up to the knee and from the knee to the ankle and so on. This was a fairly long process getting the weights correct for the animation process but it will allow for smoother motion and less disfiguration.

Here is a quick render of the model with basic texture (which I will be updating) and lighting. I was really playing around with the controls to see what positions would suit the character and how they would behave.