Rig for the body

I’ve been working on this rig for 4 days now and I think I nailed most of the functionality this character would need. Some highlighted features

• Leg system with blending from stretchy to normal IK setup
• Flexible spine with 2 main controllers (which should be enough for most animations) and third override control for tweaking the shape
• Flexible head setup with broken hierarchy which means, so it can either be animated in a standard way, or considered as a continuous spline with the body.
• 2 independent blend systems on arms. 1. standard IK/FK blending and 2. hose/solid blend system. These are separated, so rubber hose shapes are following and can be animated in both IK and FK modes.
• Twist bones in upper arm and forearm are working also in rubber hose mode.
• UI or viewport controls for fingers and Hand pose storing system based on great PEN attribute holder (by Paul Neale, see links) with presets, copy/paste from one hand to another

Direct Link to Video (.mp4, 32 MB)

So that’s it for the body. It looks to be pretty stable and I’ve been trying to minimise any threats of Gimbal Lock so it shouldn’t be happening, however gimbal is a filthy skunk which can occur on a weirdest occasions so I won’t be sure until I animate it.

Now I need to figure out how to make the face work, so it doesn’t brake completely when stretched, bent and generally distorted. I’ll probably need to do a few test of a bone based facial system and if that doest do the trick, I’ll stick with morphs. For the eyes to follow the stretching I was thinking about putting an xForm on them (to be able to animate gizmo) and then actually skinning them to the head bones so they would flex and bend with it. Also I still haven’t touched on IK/FK pose matching. I’ve already got one hint on it, but I haven’t had time to try it out yet. Any suggestions are welcome.

Luckily skinning is fast end easy on this kind of character and it looks like I don’t even need any skin fixing or muscle bones to make it work.