Toolkit 3D - Legs Rig

 Toolkit 3D - Legs Rig

Rigging Introduction

Rigging is the process of creating a skeleton that aligns to a character, and allows for that character to be moved and animated. Rigs are made up of joints and bones. Joints acts as individual points, such as elbows or knees, and bones connect them together. Because Rigging is a precise process, care must be exercised to avoid things going wrong in the process of rigging.

I plan to use a workflow of ZBrush/Blender, so I know how to rig in Blender. This is going to be a series of blogs detailing how I go about creating a rig from scratch, starting with the legs. Firstly, we start with adding a bone.

We then move this into place for the foot. I like to start here because we can start at ground level and work our way up with the body. Also because I am planning to symmetrize, I only create one side of the body. I make sure to rename this bone "Foot_l" too for the symmetry later on. I rename every bone from this point on to end with "_l"

I then add another bone. In this case, I create a bone for the heel which will connect to the back of the foot here. Firstly I position it where it needs to go. I also resized it. After that I selected both bones, and joined them together. I then select the foot, and go into the relations menu. I select the heel, and check the connected box, connecting the bones together.

I repeat this process until the legs are fully rigged one side, and connect to a central point where the spine starts.

After this, we can symmetrize the legs by selecting the bones we need to symmetrize, right clicking and selecting symmetrize.

We then end up with a fully posable pair of legs, which can then be used in a rig to pose a character.