Rigging and Skinning my Ranger Model

Using the rigging tutorial on the toolkit website, I began forming a skeleton for my character. I adapted the basic example into a skeleton that applied to my own model.

Once the legs were formed and parented to a core pelvis joint, I added IK handles. The pelvis is the start joint, indicated by the white triangle, and the toe is the end joint.

Grouping and centring pivots to create desired joint movement.

I began adding attributes to my foot control, creating versatile and specific controls such as ‘foot roll’ and ‘heel lift’. This step will be very beneficial when I animate a walking sequence.

Linking the control to the attributes that were created.

Creating controls helps to manipulate attributes without potentially damaging or interfering with the skeleton. The pelvis control has a shape that symbolises its joint, making it recognisable.

Locking channels to help make movement accurate and remove unnecessary animation.

Once the legs and feet were parented and properly set-up, I continued up the spine using the ‘joint’ tool.

This hagiarchy of joints also needed controls, each circle corresponds with a spine, chest or neck joint.

Parenting the new spine joints, similarly to the legs, creates cohesive movement.

Hand joints for very simple movement. The video example includes all four fingers and a thumb, but my character moves his hands more like mittens.

Moving on from the spine, I created a hand and its controls. I sped up this process my mirroring the limb to the opposite side, creating a right and left arm.

Adding limitations to the fingers, preventing any distortion when animating the model.

Grouping and adding a main control in order to access the entire skeleton at once.

Once the skeleton was created, I used the component editor to distribute the weight properly across the models joints. The table allows me to know where the weight of each vertex is located.

I worked up the model, fixing weight distributions and testing the movement of the model around its new skeleton.

The finalised rigged and skinned model has colour markings to indicate the different areas of anatomy, finalising this process with extra clarity.