Rigging the character.

Initially, I created my own skeleton for my character, using just the joints;



Using the left and right view, I tried to match up the character and its skeleton as best as I could.

And when I felt like the joints were in decent places and everything matched up, I binded the skin to the joints.

Alot of regular movements were okay, although some did not work well with the joints and needed fixing. When a rigged characters skin deforms you have to weight the skin to the bone so that the least amount of distortion would happen. But a lot of the movements this character would be doing looked okay. Since I wanted to finish this project I decided to leave out the weighting. If i could go back I would put in the extra time to finish this model completely.

However, I ran into a problem when I finished rigging my character. When I exported the character into my scene. I had to resize it, but when I did the rig wouldnt resize, even if it was un-binded.
This meant I had to rig my character all over again which took me a lot of time.

To get around this I just used the quick rig tool;



This new option creates a rig for my character automatically. Alot of the time it would be very basic and would need some adjusting. However for this character the rig seemed to work quite well.



Here is the rigged character, ready to get put into my scene.