The start of the rigging process.

The start of the rigging process.

This actually isn’t the start of the rigging process. I started testing the character as I built him up testing weighting methods and testing the arms and legs and hands to make sure they will animate properly. One of the main things the character really needed to do was to hold fruit and grab sticks.

So I made a basic hand rig and basic weighted it and made a little video to show how the hand will grasp things. This hand will be able to spread open better once it’s fully rigged later and it will have controls for each segment of each finger later.

I have more rigging that I have done so far, I have made a stretchy spine with top animation and bottom animation controls, shoulder joints with animation controls and an ik/fk blending arm with controls. I was supposed to do the skeleton, joint orientation and basic spine and tail setup for end of term which I achieved but instead of doing the tail I decided to take on the arm as I know I’ve had problems before with arms so I wanted to get what I considered the hard part out the way. However I have ran into some problems getting the joints in position which is proving to be difficult in finding a solution this is a problem I had last time I made a rig for several weeks. I intend to look at how I managed to overcome the problem before and start over again and build a new arm. I’m going to take my time to understand this fully again so I can make the rig work properly rather than rushing it and having a half done rig. I will post some videos of the parts of the rig working as an when I have it all working smoothly.