Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 9.20
A root bone.
Note
You've no doubt seen in this section the frequent movement between Edit and Pose modes. This
is quite typical when rigging, although less so when animating. If the Ctrl-Tab hotkey for Pose
mode isn't burned into your brain already, make it happen.
Hands
Hands are complex. Any decent hand rig is going to be a bit nasty behind the scenes. The hand rig we're
going to do is based on a “scaling curl” control, which is shown in
Figure 9.21
. In this mini-rig, the arcs
of smaller bones are used to deform the mesh but are hidden during animation. The long bone below
them is the actual control. Scaling it causes the bone arc to curl toward its tip, as shown in the figure.
This is accomplished by extruding a small bone from the end of the control, and pointing an IK constraint
at it from the last bone in the arc. As the main control bone is scaled or rotated, the end bone follows it,
which is followed in turn by the IK-constrained arc.
This mini-rig is used on each of the fingers, and laterally across the hand to simulate the way that a hand
can curl between the index and little fingers. Let's create one of the fingers, which can be duplicated and
tweaked to fit the others.
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