Rigging

Joint Placement and Skinning

Since my character was a humanoid, I had followed the procedure for placing joints on a humanoid character. I placed the joints on the left side and the middle of the model first, and then mirrored the joints. Once I was satisfied with the joint placement, I then bound the skin to the joints, in preparation for the IK handles.

IK Handles

The IK Handles were easy enough to create on my model. However, some settings needed to be correct, such as the “Rotate-Plane Solver” setting when creating an IK handle. Only four IK handles were required for my model, one for each ankle and wrist. After creating the IK handles, I created control handles for each IK handle to control their movement.

Control Handles

The control handles were slightly trickier, as they required slightly more preparation in order to work. Such as creating Point Constraints and Orient Constraints onto the IK handles in order for the control handles to move and rotate them. I had to remember to freeze the transformations of each control handle, as this was a major step in their creation. I created the following control handles:

• Master
• Ankles
• Hip
• Spine
• Chest
• Wrists
• Neck

FK Handles

I underwent the procedure to create the FK handles for each limb individually, as this was not a simple procedure. It was a far more complicated process than creating the IK and control handles. It required me to create Offset Groups for the Shoulder, Elbow and Wrist for the arms, and Leg, Knee and Ankle for the legs. After this, I then created the IK/FK Switch, which would easily allow me to switch between the handles when animating. By using the Node Editor, I then setup which handles would be visible when using the IK/FK Switcher.

After creating the FK handles, I set movement constraints for each limb, by clicking on each limb and opening the Attribute Editor and finding the “Limit Information” panel. There I could set the limits for the translate and rotations, in order to have realistic limb constraints.

Issues

Before animating, the hip control did not move the torso of the model down. This issue was fixed by parenting the FK handles and IK handles into the hip control and parenting the spine control into the hip control.