The Spine

Right, let's continue the skeleton setup with the spine.  Maximise your side view and create the following joints : -

Now, open up the Outliner, and rename the joints starting from the bottom up like this : -

Ok, now we need to move them into place.  Within the Outliner, select the COG (I've called it COG, as this stands for Centre Of Gravity), and move it into place, so that it sits as best as you can get around the middle of the character using the side view, to make things a little easier, turn the character layer to R - Reference, and in the Persp view, snap to this point within the middle of the character  : -

Now select the Head joint, and snap it to the middle CV of the nurbs guide curve which lies in the head area : -

And finally, select the Head_End joint, and snap to the middle vertex on the top of the character model, once you've done this, you can change the character layer back to T - Template, and again, once you've done that select the COG Joint and add the whole set of joints to the Skeleton_L Layer : -

Ok, let's go back to another part of the skeleton, within the Outliner, select the Left_Clavicle joint, and the Channel Box, in the Translate Z box, type 1 and press Return, now with the Left_Clavicle still selected, press the down arrow key on the keyboard, it should now jump down the next bone in the hierarchy, the Left_Shoulder joint, now snap that joint back to the middle CV of the nurbs guide curve, basically your snapping it back to the location it was at before we moved the Left_Clavicle joint.  Now, we've finished with our Guide Curves for the main body now, so open the Outliner and select the following curves within the Guide_Curves group and delete them, once you've done that, you should be left only with the guide curves for the eyes which we will be utilising later.  : -

Right. moving on, if you haven't already done so, template the character and guide_curves layers, so that we can concentrate on the joints only.  We're now going to set up the rest of the leg joints, in the side view, we need to create some more joints that will aid us in the reverse foot setup that we will be producing, so, in the side view, set up your joints like this, use Grid Snapping, it doesn't matter about the placement as we will be moving them into place later, press Enter when your done : -

Within the Outliner, rename the joints like this : -

Select the LReverse_Foot joint, add it to the Skeleton_L Layer, now we'll move it into place, turn off grid snapping, and instead, in the Persp view, vertex snap the LReverse_Foot joint to the Ankle joint like this : -

With the LReverse_Foot still selected, go into the Channel Editor and within the Translate Y box, change the value to 0, this will make sure our LReverse_Foot setup lies on the ground origin.  Now, select each joint and snap to the corresponding joint, i.e. LReverse_Toe Snapped to LToe and so on : -

Before we move onto the next part, the actual rigging process, we'll need to do one more thing with all of our joints, and that is to orient them.  Ok, open the Outliner and select your COG joint, now select from the menu, DISPLAY > COMPONENT DISPLAY > LOCAL ROTATION AXES, you should now get something like this : -

continue on until you have done the same for all joints, you will have to do this manually 1 by 1, so just press G to repeat the last step for each joint in turn when you select it, you will end up with this :-

Now, select the COG joint, from the menu select SKELETON > ORIENT JOINT and open the options box, we want to make sure all of our joints local rotation axes all point in the same direction, for the COG joint, set it to the following - none, note the Y always points to the next joint, switch off the Hierarchy and Scale options : -

Now carry on and do the same for all the other joints 1 by 1, basically, we're resetting all the joints, so that we can now in turn set each joint to what we want it to be orientated at, once you've done that, you'll notice that all joint orients are the same and all have Y as the Up axis. Now before we continue, we need to download a melscript that will aid us in the orientation of all of our joints, the script (By Jason Schleifer) we'll be using is called jsOrientJointUI.Mel, and can be downloaded from this address : -

http://homepage.mac.com/jschleifer/HomePage/melScripts.html

Ok, once you've downloaded the script, put it in your usual scripts directory, and then within Maya, type into the Command Line in the bottom left,   jsOrientJointUI;   , hilight it, and then drag and drop it onto your shelf as shelf item, now click on your latest shelf addition, you should get a pop up menu like this : -

now go back to the original COG joint and then press the down arrow key to move up to the next joint in the hierarchy, you should have the SpineA joint now selected, and select either Z Up or Z Down, in the case of SpineA, Z Up should be the one you will be using, carry on, until you have done all the joints in that hierarchy, you should be getting results similar to this diagram: -

What you'll find is joints slightly tilted in one direction (backover) will require Z Up Orientation and joints tilted forward will require Z Down Orientation.  Note, don't worry about the end joints.  Now do the same for the Leg joints, for the first joint in the chain, you will probably use Z Up, now carry on doing the same for the rest of the joints in the legs, and also for the reverse foot joints.  Now with the reverse foot joints, select the first one, it can probably get a bit confusing, so you should orient like this, 1st Joint, Z Up, all other joints, Z Down.  Now moving onto the arm, you'll utilise Z Up orientation all the way along, and again for the fingers, Z Up too.  With the Thumb Joints, you'll again utilise the Z Up Orientation, now, once you've done, you'll have something like this : -

As far as joint orientation goes, that's it, and the whole reasoning behind doing this, is to make sure all of our joints will rotate in the correct direction that we require when animating.  Now we're going to parent some of our joints together : -

Character Rigging Tutorial - Third Page