Skeletons

Start with a completed, untextured character.

Never create a joint in Perspective mode. Always use a use Front Side or Top views only.

Go to Skeletons > Joint Tool (or locate it on your shelf if you’ve got a useful custom shelf OR use the “y”key which is the hot key.

Once you have finished adding your first joints, hit enter to create a Joint Chain. To add to it, click on the joint you wish to add to and then continue clicking where you want to place the next joint.

Torso

The root joint is usually the Pelvis joint. From here you can run a few joints up the spine to the Neck and from the neck to the Head. You can also add a joint for the eyes which can be used as a reference if animating without the mesh shown.

Legs

From the Root/Pelvis joint comes the Hip joint. This doesn’t need to be connected up until later on though. The Hip joint goes to the Knee joint which goes to the Ankle joint which goes to the Foot joint. I think adding in a joint from the ankle to the Heel would be ideal as this is where the rotation for the foot would originate from (or at least where it looks the most realistic).

Connecting and mirroring the leg joints

To connect the leg to the Pelvis, select the hip joint, then shift-select the pelvis joint. Select Skeleton > Connect Joint > []. Change the mode to ‘Parent Joint’ and hit ‘Connect’.

Select the hip joint and go to Skeleton > Mirror joint. Select the relevant axis and ensure it joints automatically as a child of the Pelvis joint.

Arms

Between the Neck and the Shoulder, create a Collar Bone/Shoulder Blade joint.

From this joint comes your Shoulder joint to Elbow joint to Wrist joint.

From the Wrist comes each finger which contains a Knuckle joint, a FirstFinger joint, SecondFinger joint and FingerTip joint.

The finger tip joint, whilst not technically a ‘joint’ as such is used to move the tip of the finger and bend it on the SecondFinger joint.

Connecting and mirroring the arm joints

To connect the Collar Bone/Shoulder Blade to the topmost Spine joint, select the collar bone joint, then shift-select the pelvis joint.

Go to Skeleton > Connect Joint > []. Change the mode to ‘Parent Joint’ and hit ‘Connect’.

Select the Collar Bone joint and go to Skeleton > Mirror joint. Select the relevant axis and ensure it joints automatically as a child of the topmost Spine joint.

An example listing of joints used by Ben O’Connor in the character shown is below:

Naming each and every joint as you go along is very important and very worthwhile as it saves you a lot of heart ache later when you are wanting to move specific parts and can just look them up in the inspector window instead using the joint’s name.

So for example, starting with the Hip joint, you would name it “Left/RightHipJoint”, press the down arrow to go to the next join in the chain and name it “Left/RightKneeJoint” etc. etc.

Note** If you build one side of the rig first, you can mirror joints and replace a common word in the name of each joint with another word. This means that if you name all left side joints with ‘left’ before them, when you mirror them you could replace the ‘left’ with ‘right’.

Once each joint has been named, jump back into Perspective view and move/rotate  the joint to be within the mesh of the hip/leg of the character as required.

Another example Joint Layout is here:

This example is not precisely a human character’s joint set up, but it could work. You have quite a bit of free reign in terms of whatever you can make work and look good.

Joint Orientation

It’s recommended that all rotations of a joint heirarchy be zeroed out. This means that when the sekelton is in the current default position, all the joint rotations are zero.

Select the Pelvis joint and go to Modify > Freeze Transformations.

Reorient all joints

You can reorient all the joints in a hierarchy to automatically face in your preferred orientation, such as XYZ.

To do so, select the Pelvis joint and go to Skeleton > Orient Joint > []. Make sure the Orientation is set to XYZ and click the Orient button.

All the joints are now reoriented to have the X-axis pointing towards their children.

The automatic orientation of the joints is not always perfect however and you might need to manually fix up pivots that could have been flipped.

Press F8 to go into ‘Component Mode‘ and enable the “?” mask button and hide the body mesh.

To manually set the rotation axis, select an incorrect local rotation axis and rotate it into a good position. For example, select the head local rotation axis by clicking on it and then Rotate the Z-axis so that the red X-axis points up like the neck axis etc. etc.

Test the crap out of the rotations to make sure they all look right.

 

Useful Things:

X-ray Mode: Go to Shading > X-ray to see the character in X-ray mode (this is useful)

Y-key: The ‘Y” key is the hotkey for the joint tool.

Animation drop down: Go to Animation drop down to get the various Animation tools.

Reroot a skeleton: Selecting a joing and using the Reroot Skeleton tool allows you to set that joint as the root of the hierarchy.

Arrow Keys: When you have a joint in a joint chain selected, you can use the arrow keys to move up and down the joints in the chain selecting the joints in said chain.

F8: Enter and exit “Component Mode”.