Posted on November 25, 2014

Problem: Explore a new rigging technique in Maya

Solution: Since, I am thinking about building a rig for the body for my 4th Project it would be good to explore the HumanIK tool. This gave me a fairly good idea of how the controls are set and how each joint behaves.

I used the getting started tutorial from Maya and then saw another video on YouTube on how to set up the rig using the Skeleton Controller window. The controller window as options anything and everything you might want to do with your character. You can use the same rig for any type of character and not just humanoids. There are plenty of options to control how many joints you want in every part of the body, if you want fingers or not, etc.

The only thing you have to do is align the skeleton according to your character on the left side and mirror it and adjust the right side if needed. Then you can simply create the control rig from the menu. The best part is that control rig locks the certain attributes for a particular joint, thus making sure that when controlling the rig joints won’t rotate or translate in the wrong direction and also so that you don’t accidentally move joints that shouldn’t be moving.