Rigging The Spine and Arm

The best place to start rigging a human model is traditionally the base of the spine. When placing the 'bones, is it important to have both the front and side views open to make sure that the bones are being placed inside the mesh of the human. Creating the rigging in a seperate layer also makes it easier to change from mesh to rig, as well as distinguishinig between mesh and bone.

The spine was made by placing a hip bone, and then extruding a second bone all the way up to the neck. This second bone was then subdivided to form 4 bones which make up the spine. The top spine bone was then extuded upwards to form a neck bone, and again to form a head 'bone'.










The arm bones were then placed, made up of a collar, upper arm, lower arm and wrist bone extending into the base of the finger tips. To add movability to the fingers, a bone was added to the ring finger, and then subdivided to form 3 finger bones. The finger bones were then duplicated and placed in the middle finger, and resized to scale. Before duplicating for the rest of the fingers, copy rotation constraints were placed in the newly duplicated bones to mimic the rotation of the ring finger bones. The middle figner bones were then duplicated and placed in the index, and pinky fingers before being resized.










I used the same method to create the bones in the thumb. Two more bones were then added, one in the thumb and one in the ring finger. Now that was done, several IK bones were created, which would be used to control the movement of the bones without having to individually alter each one. An IK bone was added to the end of several bones in the arm and fingers, followed by an IK constraint to the connecting bone which allowed realistic looking arm movement by grabbing and pulling on the IK bones. Several bones were parented before I was left with the final product.










Although it requires a lot of time and patience, I didn't really run into any major problems with the rigging since I kept referring to the tutorial on what to do. The next stage is to rig the leg bones.