Taking on applications involved in manual rigging, the importance of locators to allow for joint placement accuracy and rotation orientation is stressed. During the Process, locators are placed at key and central points of the rig so that when the joint placement takes place, the rotation is easier to aline in a cleaner and more efficient manner.
When placing all of the locators in areas such as the hand, it is important that the rotation is accurate throughout all the hands and individual fingers so that it is clear which locator group is which and how the joint will align with the locator later on.
Once creating the joints it is important to line the joints up and rotate from the highest point in the joint hierarchy so that there is not any messy translation and rotation information that can cause containing and skin weighting issues later on in the rigging process.
After carefully placing each of the joints at the different locators on one half of the leg and upper body, it was important that the bend of the leg and the spine were considered, easily for IK placement in the leg later on so that it has a clear directional pivot.
Rotating and placing each of the skeletal joins into place in the fingers proved to be the trickiest part of this process as the hierarchal rotational alignment caused a lot of adjustment to get everything in order on each finger.
After completing the arm and the hand, I duplicated this on the YZ axis so that it would copy exactly to the left side of the body. While utilising the mirror joint options, I also changed the name of the copied joints to have L_ at the beginning of each join to distinguish the separate copy and keep the outliner clean and concise.
Initially, during duplication, I had an issue that would not allow me to safely mirror the copy over due to “too many arguments”, which after some research on the Autodesk website, clarified to me that there are too many selected joints to perform the mirror joint action. This meant that I had to select the beginning of the joint hierarchy, the clavicle, rather than each individual joint in the arm.
After completing that issue I had a character with a fully formed skeleton ready to be rigged for next weeks skin binding class.