Rigging - Female body

This exercise requires us to create a female body rig. I have to say, this was an extremely tedious exercise, with multiple videos to follow. The start was fairly simple, where I had to create a skeleton using the joint tool as shown below. These joints then had to be named appropriately to avoid confusion during the rigging process. Terms such as Lft_Hip and Rht_Hip are used to keep the naming conventions consistent.

After that, I followed the video tutorial to parent the joints accordingly. Then, I created the joints for the arms and fingers in the same way, by using the joint tool. Afterwards, I had to ensure that the axes were pointing in the same general directions as to prevent problems in the future. This was fairly simple, except the fingers, where I encountered some problems where the axes could not be adjusted. To solve the problem, I duplicated a finger which has the correct axes and replaced the problematic ones.

Moving on to creating the IK handles, I initially used the SCSolver, which was incorrect. I quickly deleted and redid the IK handles using the RPSolver. After creating the IK handles, I had to snap the pivot points of the IK handles accordingly to their respective joints.

Next, I create controllers for the legs using circles, scaled to fit the feet as shown above. Using the point and orient constraint, I managed to make my leg twist and move accordingly by controlling the controller. Afterwards, I added attributes such as the ball lifts and toe lifts to make the feet more realistic and flexible.

The process that followed next was a tedious one regarding the Set driven key tool. By setting key values accordingly, it allowed the joints to move and rotate. Next came the knees where an edited sphere was used. The sphere was then attached to the ankle IK using a pole vector constraint. Then, I parent it to the foot's controller. Following the video, a cube was used for the shoulder controller. I created a locator and snapped it to the shoulder joint. Like the knee, a pole vector constraint was also used to attach the controller. The elbow controller was created in a similar way. The hip controller was simpler, a cube that is pivoted to the centre of the pelvis joint with a point and orient constraint. The neck and spine controllers were created using curves and enabling rotations for some joints.

Poses:

Running

Sitting

 Kung fu



Reflection:
This exercise was the most time consuming of all. I had been wondering how rigs are created ever since the spiderman exercises. Now that I've tried it myself, I must say that rigging is an extremely tedious process. I've learnt that rigging a human body is not easy, as we have to take into consideration the number of joints we have and the terms for them. Every joint is essential to create a realistic and workable rig.