Leg Rigging

 The fundementals of rigging seem fairly straight forward. You develop a skeletal system to which you assign controls of various types. This project required the rigging of a pair of legs.
So to start we needed to apply some bones to the legs

This proved fairly easy as once you simplify the bones in the foot, the leg is a simple system of bones going from the hip, to the knee, to the ankle, to the ball of the foot, to the toe. These are then fairly easy to attribute an IKhandle to. Point constrain a simple NURBS circle in Maya to the IKhandle and you have a very quickly made control for your leg bones.

Creating a reverse foot lock was fairly simple once you knew how. It was merely a matter of connecting the correct SCcontrol to the correct bone. The hard part was making sure the skin didnt deform whilst the leg was animated. This was done through a "paint" tool which told each face in the skin mesh how much it could or could not deform when being manipulated.