Blog Post 8 - Rigging - Joints and Skinning

In this post I will be talking about the start of rigging which are the joints and the skinning. What I did was create joints for the arms from the shoulder down to the hands and the legs from the hip down to the end of the toes. When creating the joints you need the joints facing outwards. From this point I parented the joints from the ends of the arms and legs towards the the torso so you can control them from the tops of there individual structures. After this I created the master joint and the hip sway join above the two leg joints and then built it up to the chest. At the chest I built joints out towards the arms. These joints are the clavicles and then a built joints out towards the neck up to the top of the head. I parented the legs to the hip sway and then parented the arms to the clavicles. Then next parent is the head down the hip sway/master. This allows you to control the skeletal structure from the hips. This makes the animating easier as you can have control of the structures from the hips.

After the joints are in place following the topology of the model, I then went into the skin tab and binded the model to the joints. Now when I the joints, the skin will move with it.

The next stage of rigging is the painting of weights.