Mrrrr stretch

The stretchy was prity straight forward once I found the easiest way of doing it. I originally tried using clusters to control the movement of the back and the twist but this didnt work with my rig. I also tried controlling the spine straight from the spline curve cv's and attaching them to the manipluators but that was an epic fail. In the end I found the best thing to do was to use two seperate joints as control joints and use them in the same way as clusters to control the joints and then attach the control rig to this but I had to rearrange everything in the hierachy to make sure everything followed correctly. But overall once I found the easiest way that worked for me the spine was quite easy to do. Anyways the playblast below says it all really.

The next stage I made sure I had right was the shoulder I wasn't sure if I would need it but it was prity straight forward for this part so I decided to put them in anyways even though I probably wouldn't need them in the walk but I thought as may use this rig at a later date they may be useful. I just made sure I had some distinguishable manipulators from the arm anyways the playblast below shows the range of movement in the shoulder. It will look wierd and disconnected but thats just becuase i dont have any skin on my rig its just basic geometry.

The last main thing to do on my rig was the neck and head. I decided as i didnt require to much movement in the neck during an animated walk so what I did was make a baisc manipulator and constrained the neck and head joints to this and then heirachy the manipulator to the top spine manipulator. I made sure the corresponding joints were connected so the head followed the rest of the body but could still move on its own this took some trial and error but I got the right order of things in the end. Below is the playblast showing the rage of movement in the head.

The last thing i did before animating the character manrig as a whole was to make sure everything was heirarchied correctly and hidden away the bets I could. Also everything needed to follow the main body of the rig when animating so that nothing was left behind. I had to look at a variety of rigs to see how others had done this. I found a way that worked for my rig after a bit of epic failing but in the end i feel my rig was quite tidy. The other thing i spent some time doing was locking away things in the channel box so things couldn't be animated that were not supposed to be on the manipulators i think i did a good job of this but there were still many many things i probably have to lock away but i dont know how to, ive tried locking the geometry so you cant delete it when you select it in the outliner but its still deletable or it disapears so i dont know how to get round that one yet.