Rigging arms

  The next thing I learnt to rig was the arms for my character. This I did by creating bones for the shoulder, elbow, wrist and four bones for each finger. I then added an IK handle from the shoulder to the wrist. This enabled me to move the whole arm just by moving the wrist. I created a controller to add to the wrist. The controller I made was a circle created using NURBS. I thought the circle was best as it could could go around the wrist and be an obvious indication of what it would do. I then constrained this to the wrist so the arm could be moved from this controller which I named appropriately (Left_Arm_Ctrl).
  The next step was creating a controller which could be used to curl the fingers. This task was easy to accomplish  but tedious to do so for all ten fingers over both arms. I created a controller for each finger on the hands and named each one accordingly (Left_Arm_Finger_1_Ctrl). After doing this, I added an attribute to each controller named once again accordingly (Left Arm Finger 1) and set minimum and maximum values of -1 to 10. This meant I could key this to an animation with driven keys and manipulate the animation by a numerical value. I created driven keys for each set of bones on the fingers. I had to set the driver as being the attribute I mentioned previously, and the driven being the finger bones. I set -1 as being a straight finger and 10 being a curled finger by bending each joint appropriately, and keying it to the numerical value I had chosen.


  I had to sort out the heirachy of my controls in the outliner. I parented the finger curl controls to the actual wrist controls on each arm. This meant that I could move the actual wrist controller and the finger curl controls would follow the wrist wherever it went.