You might want to check my Credits for this tutorial. There is no way I could have done this with out those sources. Basically what this tutorial is about are the concepts I have pulled from those places and I'd like to share those with you!

So...Where Do We Start?

Before you start your rigging there is a lot of planning that needs to be involved. First we need to figure out what kind of character this rig is for. Is the rig a cartoon type with exaggerated motions or it is more real like an actual human figure? What are the movements this character will doing? If he is running a lot you'll need to make sure an fine tune the legs and arms, you might not need facial expressions as much.

Once you make a list with everything you need you can move on to prepping your rig. You can start with the normal T-Pose but I'm using the Relaxed T-Pose as the book 'Body Language - Advanced 3D Character Rigging' stats:

Placing the arms at a 45-degree angle from the body puts them in the middle of where the majority of the movement will be.

Eric Allen & Kelly L. Murdock

Using the Relaxed T-Pose I have found to be a little bit more difficult and the over all change doesn't change in geometry doesn't change that much. But with that being said, I think that it does function a lot better then the regular pose.

Your Genie in a Bottle! (The Wish List)

The next step is making a wish list of everything you would like for your rig to do. Once you learn the terminology and different ways to do rigging you can add more specific technical aspects to this. For me, and maybe some of you all, this is my first time doing an advanced rig so I'm going to keep it simple. Here is my list:

• FK on the arms, legs and spine
• Control Boxs for eyes, mouth, cheeks, lips and ears
• Group Selections (individual limbs, neck, spine, etc...)
• Set up an interface in lightwave to work with the rig.

So right now it's very simple and I'm sure it's not descriptive enough, but I'll refine it the further I get into the process.

Nulls, Nulls, Nulls!

One thing to keep in mind, nulls are your friend. I use a lot of nulls so don't be scared of them! Everything from setting up rigging controls to setting up FK they are the best thing ever invented!

Rig Controls

One of the most important parts of a rig is to keep everything as accessable as possible and intuitive for the animator. From my experience I noticed there was a fine line between what I added into the rig and what I actually used. You don't want controls to slow your animation down, they are there to increase the spead of the actual animation.

Things you might need to know about Lightwave

It's very important to know how to use Lightwave, I'm not going to go over how to use lightwave. Rather, for learning how to create/edit bones I'd look at a couple of the related tutorials that other people have created. But below is my quick tips I took out of those tutorials for learning how to manipulate the bones.

I'd recommend creating the bones in Layout for the first time rather then craeting skelegons in modeler. Modeler is easier but the main thing you need to learn is changing the bones in Layout and making corrections. The ability to edit bones in layout is very, very, VERY important to know. With that said here are two quick commands to remember, Shift+R and Shift+P. Shift+R is like the 'Scale' for bones. Never ever ever use scale on a bone unless you intend to scale the geometry. Shift+P will record the pivot point, meaning, when you get a bone in place it will change the rotation making it a lot less to gimble lock that joint/bone.

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