Rigging Basics/Creating the legs

  In the first lesson I learnt about the basic principles of rigging, what it can be used for and the terminology needed to understand the fundamentals of the subject. I started off by creating a simple leg rig using Autodesk: Maya 2012. This rig was made by creating bones with the joint tool, and positioning them where the basic bones in a human leg are. After this I created an IK handle from the foot to the hip. This means you can move the foot wherever you like and the knee joint will follow without having to move it individually. The IK tool is also used on the different parts of the foot (Toe/Ball/Ankle) so the foot can be moved from different pivot points.

  Once the basic leg was created, I made a controller which is parented (connected) to the foot joint in the leg hierarchy. This was then named appropriately in the outliner (which is used to keep track of all the joints, groups and controls)  e.g. "Foot_CTRL".

  After this I created different groups for the foot joints. By doing this and positioning the pivot points in the right place (e.g. Ball_Lift_Grp pivot is on the ball of the foot) I could set driven keys to the foot controller. This means when I select the foot control, I can add more settings to the attributes of this that can animate different parts of my rig with numerical value. The advantage of this is that moving my rig into its original position, can be done just be changing the numerical value to 0 in the attributes.

  I also learnt about using constraints on rigs. A constrain is where you connect two things together (e.g. a controller and a wheel). This means what you do to one of these, depending on the order which you have parented it, will happen to the other.