Rigging 'Yin'

The 'Quickrig' tool has worked well with previous rigs, and I therefore utilized it again to rig character Yin.

 I started by arranging the joint references, then generated a skeleton for my character.

I deleted the arms from the rig befire skinning it to my character. I encountered problems with the 'toebase' joints and spent some time adjusting the influence of these foot joints. I then worked up the body, adjusting influence through the joint hagiarchy. 

The spine was a challenge to skin, because there's a lot of geometry under the character's poncho. I had to gradually adjust the influence of inner geometry to ensure it didn't deform and become visible on the outside. The feathers were also very tedious to tidy, each being individual pieces of geometry.  

I struggled to skin the scarf ribbons, which intersect the legs when the foot control is lifted. Skinning them to the upper leg wasn't satisfactory, so I left them as is. I might revisit this issue later and make the scarfs nCloth's, or make them dynamic joint chains to create secondary animation. This might prevent geometry collisions and would make the scarfs less rigid in animation.  

 

Finally, I spent some time tidying the feathers around the characters head, ensuring that head and shoulder movement had correct feather movement. 

Yin now has a fully working rig, including leg, spine, shoulder and head movement. I was able to avoid face rigging ,because of the mask that obscures his facial features.