Creating Control Rig

The first step to create my rig is to build the character's skeleton using joints. It is very important to pay special attention to the orientation and make sure that the joint structure is based close to biped's anatomy in this case.

This is the main skeleton structure finished, to do this I had to make sure it was up to scale to the character:

And of course that the joint orientations were all right, starting by doing all the Left hemisphere bone structure X-axis pointing down the bone, Y-axis up and Z-axis forward. One mirrored the orientations would also have to be mirrored so the behaviour is complementary.

After I had my Base structure I duplicated Spine, arms and legs twice to have individual chains for FK and IK.

The image below shows all the FK joint chains and their respective controls. At this stage, I also included some IK/FK switches to change the influence of the IK and FK structures on the main Skeleton and control the visibility of the controls.

The image below shows all the IK joint chains and their respective controls. I found that doing the IK setup required a bit more time and attention as it involved different types of IK-handles and a Reverse Foot structure.

Along with this structure, I also made a Reverse foot structure that would allow the character to do Heel Roll, Ball Roll, Tip Roll, Heel Tilt, Tip Tilt, Sides Tilt and Ball Rotation.

Finally, it took me one week and a half to have all the Control Rig ready to skin the character. In the process, I encountered so many problems that I lost count and I really got to feel in my skin the frustration of having spent hours on something that doesn't work and having to investigate to find a solution.

Something really encouraging I realized through all the struggles I experienced was that I actually was learning because in the end I always found a solution, all because I understood the process and the theory.

I would say that I had a lot of problems with joint orientations even though I was using a custom tool that allowed automatic joint orientation on hierarchies. I also had some problems with the controls when I didn't have their offset's pivot right where their respective joints where.

This is an image of my finished Control Rig.