skinning

now comes the part where every rigger has there problems....skinning

skinning is where you combine the skeletal rig to the mesh so that when you move the rig it influences the mesh also this can be done through either two way or a combination of both methods and those methods are paint weight and component editor

paint weight is where you literally paint the vertices that you want to influence so in this case i have paint weighted the head the white area is is where it will be heavily influenced and the black area is where there will be no influence at all originally i had a problem with this because when i created the original skin cluster when i moved the head the collar of the characters clothing moved with it this obviousdly doesnt happen do i painted out the vertices so that they were not influenced by the skin cluster

the other method is a little more mathmatical which is using the componant editor so what would happen here is the the amount of influence is measured between the value of 0 and 1 so 0 would be no influence and 1 would be heavy influence therefore a value of 0.5 would be medium influence#

through a combination of these two mnethos i have created a reasonable edited skin cluster that influences the character in a good way

head

now here is where things get interesting because up to this point i have been given guidance by my lecturere on how to rig but then when asking about how to rig the head i was on my own and had to find out for myself so after a bit of searching around i managed to find a way to rig the head

so first i linked both clavicles of both my arms to the spine and then created two bones one for the neck and one for the head and then i created and orb type controller and parented that to the bottom of the head bone so that whenever i move the orb i can rotate the head and move it up and down

spine

for rigging the spine you need to create a rough spine type shape consisting of 3-4 bones  and 3 controllers to control the top, middle and bottom of the spine

once thats done move the pivot points of the controllers to where the joints are and then orient constrain them to that joint

once the controllers are constrained parent the top controller to the middle and both of those controllers to the bottom so that they each have there own individual influence

legs

so first off again use the joint tool to create a leg and duplicate it (keeping to naming conventions left lef right leg etc.

once that's done create a foot controller and name it and duplicate it and name the duplicated controller depending on which leg your going to use it for.

create ik handles on each leg from the top of the leg to the ankle and then parent the controller to the ik handle.

again going back to the attributes we need to create a toe bend and a heel roll this is the same process as what we went through for the finger curl

finger curls

for the finger curls this is done through attribute and set driven keys so first off create a controller symbolising  which finger it will control in my case ive used letters to indicate the allocated finger it controls

once the controls are made you need to create an attribute for them to do this, select the control go to modify > add attribute >  and name the attribute keep the number as float and set the minmum value as -1, the max value at 10 and the default value at 0

next up comes the tricky part creating the restrictions of the values through set driven keys so you go to animate > set driven key and a menu will appear 

this is the menu now even though this menu doesn't say it you should select the control and then the attribute you created as the driver and the the correspondent finger as the driven, so first you want to set the default value so you key everything and the value of 0 will stay at the default value then you set the attribute to -1 and then select the finger to rotate up a bit on whatever axis your fingers rotate nicely on and then key that once thats done you need to set the value to 10 and curl the fingers round to however far you want them to curl

IK handles

next up create an IK handle (make sure its a rotate plane IK) from the wrist to the shoulder and then add a controller maybe a circle surrounding the wrist and orient constrain the controller to the ik this will mean that when you select the circle it will select the ik in effect making a controller for the arm/wrist

making the bones

first off there is making the arm here is a simple start of using the joint tool to make a rough depiction of the arm

note: you can always put your desired mesh in first so that you can get a good idea on how well the bones fitinside the mesh

starting from the clavicle (shoulder bone) all the way down to the five fingers

in order to make the fingers you need to keep re-selecting the wrist joint and create a rough finger/thumb bone

once your hand and arm are complete NAME THEM! this will help later on