Rigging

I was given a mesh by one of the character modelers, that actually came with an entire skeleton, already skinned and everything. That soon proved to be not as good as it sounds. The skeleton has various issues but it all boiled down to the inherited rotation values and orients in the joints, making it really hard to keep it, so I decided to just make a custom one.

Using Maya's HumanIK tool, I've built a skeleton for the character. This tool creates a skeleton automatically based on the mesh, so it did save me some time since I didn't have to manually place each joint, I just scaled and arranged them to better fit the model.

After that, I set up some IK chains for arms and legs and added controls so animators could easily use them. I connected these chains and IKs to nurbs circles that can be keyed.