Amani - Character Rig - WIP

I've had this character completed for a while but finally decided to set up a rig for her. The rig is still very much a work in progress and the skinning needs a ton of work but I wanted to share some of the cool things I did for this rig so far

This is my character Amani and she's getting rigged!

This is a screenshot of the full rig. It has manipulators for several body part.

Just a simple leg IK demonstrating the binded mesh. As mentioned this is still a WIP and I still need to work on the skinning and weight painting

The manipulators also have some custom attributes that are binded to reverse heel joints that let you do some pretty cool things. I enjoy creating tools like this to make an animators life easier :)

One of my favorite things to do is to set driven keys so you can easily do things like curl fingers with custom attributes.

Showcasing early stages of how the whole body moves from the hips manipulator

The spine and neck both use an IK Spline and can be moved as well as twisted through the N and S manipulators

Showing the Neck manipulator as well

Also set up a quick little eye manipulator

I took the head model into Zbrush and sculpted a handful of different blend shapes to use for this rig.

I then set up some basic controls for the blend shapes using curves and the expression editor to link to the blend shape attributes

I also created a wire deformer with some clusters along the eyebrows that could be manipulated for some other more expressions.