Posted on November 11, 2014

Problem: Rig the character mesh provided and animate it using controllers.

Solution: For this project, I crated a custom skeleton for the character mesh provided and then built a custom control rig to go with it. I followed the tutorial “Introduction to Character Rigging in Maya” on Digital Tutors to build the control rig.

I started off by building the skeleton for the mesh, I did not follow the tutorial for the skeleton. It is pretty similar to the one we did for the block man. Next, I parented it to the mesh so that I could test out the control as built it and figure out which joints needed to be weight painted. As I saw the tutorial there were extra bones for the foot to get a good foot roll and thus build those next and added the necessary constraints along with set driven keys.

Next I setup up the hip, back, chest, neck and head controls. My hip control is different form the video as he had a different skeleton structure around the waist. The controllers for the fingers were pretty complicated and each joint had to be oriented manually for them to work right. I found manually orienting joints fairly complicated and although I spent around 2 hours just on 2 fingers, they still did not bend right. Hence, the finger joints don’t rotate exactly right.
I do not have controls for the knees and elbows as my IK handles were setup with IKSolver and they could not be setup with pole position constraints as in the video.

Finally I created a playblast animation showing how range of motion of joints using the controllers and a proud walk cycle animation. The videos are embedded below.

The Maya binary file is here.