Face

Finally I have rigged the face using blend shape for the eyes and joints for the mouth to try and further my skills using both techniques. I think blend shapes are very quick and easy to do however joints give you more freedom to move the joints in certain ways. Rather than making another GUI I have tried to make my rig clean by putting controllers next to the areas of the face that they move such as the overs the eyes and mouth.

Bottom Lip Close

Bottom Lip Open

Eye Blend Shapes

Eyes Closed

Top Lip Close

Top Lip Open

GUI

To further increase the ease of use within the rig I have set up a small GUI on each of the arms and the legs so that the user can easily use the attributes on the hands and feet such as the finger movement, finger spread and also the feet movement.I have done this by using set driven keys to ensure that the GUI will work with the controller to move the fingers and feet.

Finger Spread

Foot GUI

Hand GUI

Arms

The arms come next after the spine and they are very similar to the legs and from the use of set driven keys it was easy for me to set up the finger clench and finger spread. As well as the hand controller I have added another pole vector locator onto the elbow which will do the same as the knee controller keeping the elbow in the correct position. To clench the hand you can rotate each joint on the axis then set the key to key it in place.

Pole vector

Finger Clench

Hand Controller Attributes

Hand controller

Spine Clusters

Following the legs I worked my way up the body, next was the spine for this I added a IK spline handle and a curve to put a natural bend in the spine matching a real skeleton.

As well as this I have added two clusters onto the spine bones so that I can group some of the spine bones together. Then I added controllers onto the clusters and then limited the movement so that you can recreate the little spine movement of a real spine.

Lower Cluster

Lower Controller

Upper Controller

Upper Cluster

Knee Pole Vector

In addition to the feet control I have to introduce another constraint for the knee to make sure that it was always pointing the correct way even if the leg was moved. To do this I had to create a locator and the constrain it using the pole vector to the leg IK.

Foot Control

After putting the Ik's I then went onto put the controllers on the rig starting with the legs and feet. I used a Circle curve and shaped it into a foot and positioned it under the foot while also freezing the transformation and centering the pivot. Then constrained to the point and orient of the ankle.

In addition to the constraints I also added a variety of attributes to further enhance the foot controller, Ball lift, Toe lift, Toe Roll Y and Toe Roll X. These attributes do a variety of things to the controller however they make the foot more lifelike when animating such as you can pivot on the toe and other movements.

Using set driven keys I was able to set the limitations of what the attributes could do which proved very helpful in the later stages of rigging.

Toe Lift

Ball Lift

Toe Roll Y

After finishing the attributes for the left leg I then did the same for the right making sure I was using the same work flow, I didnt just want to copy it over as i felt i would learn more by doing it over and over.

IK's

After putting in the bones I added the IK's which connects and enables the bones to correctly move with each other. Again I have properly named the IK's so that I know what each one is and is easily accessible.

Bones

To rig a human body you first need to put the bones throughout the body in there correct place starting from hips. I first made the leg and then duplicated them over for the other leg and then parented the hip joints to the lowest spine joint. For personal preference I also have added an extra joint in the place of the tail bone which is there so that I can easily select all the bones  and acts a parent bone.

When I have properly positioned the bones I then went onto correctly naming each bone so that when putting the controllers and constraints I knew which bone was which, in the later stages of the rigging process this really helped.

I took special care when putting in the bones for the hands so that I could put them in the right place concerning the mesh.