Week 4, 5 - Rigging and Reaction Manager

To rig the character, the bones have to be adjusted to the mesh and aligned with links of the character to get the later movement (animation) working correctly.

Rig + Mesh:

All bones in my character will be controlled with helpers.

The helper consists either of a spline circle, which is copied three times and rotated to form an object like this:

Or other spline objects for different body parts:

Hand Rigging:

To have full control over the hand and arm I am using an IK setup, where the arm is controlled by the hand and the elbow position.

After all bones are in place a IK solver is attached from the shoulder to the Hand wrist bone. This will be used to move the hand and arm later.

The hand it self is rigged according to the mesh and how many finger links are needed.

IMPORTANT: When rigging the fingers make sure that the bone links are on the outside (top) of the finger to have the finger bend like a real finger and not bend in the middle!!! Same goes for the elbow and knee!!!

Hand Rig:

To solve the problem of moving the fingers I am using attribute holders on the green hand spline object for each finger.
To add an attribute holder select the object which should hold the attributes and go to this menu:

The Reaction Manager to access the bone rotation and link the attribute holder sliders to the bones can be found here:

Within the reaction manager the master controller which holds the attribute holders has to be chosen and the bones which are controlled by the attribute holder are to be chosen as well to link the to the action of the reaction manager.
The reaction manger MASTER is the Attribute Holder.
The SLAVE is the bone to be controlled. This way all axis can be accessed.
A start state and end state have to be set within the Reaction manager for the bone (finger for example).

Reaction Manager:

Spine Rig:

For this model I am using simple link constraints to spline helpers around the spine to move the spine rather in having one controller, which is linked to all elements of the spine and moves all the bones.

The spine helper splines are connected to the spine helper points and their pivot point is moved to match those points which have the same pivot point as the spine bone.

Spine Helpers: