Now it’s time to start drawing joints or bones for the character’s leg. In the Joint Tool Settings panel, click on the Reset Tool tab first to make everything default. By doing so, the Tool Settings panel will be opened. Go to Skeleton Menu > Joint Tool and click on the rectangle box. Now let’s start making the skeleton setup. Your current menu will be changed into animation menu mode. In the side view, click on the Menu Mode Tab, and select the Animation menu set. By doing so, you will jump to the side view. To jump to the Side view, press and hold down the Space Bar and Right click with the mouse button on the Maya icon in the center of the view panel menu, and drag onto Side View and release the mouse button.

It is very necessary to freeze the character mesh so that it won’t create any problem while creating the bone setup. Now in the Channel Box/Layer Editor tab, click on the option indicated by the arrow of the selected character mesh. Start Maya and open the 'Char_Mesh 01.mb' file which is provided with this tutorial. In the first part we will learn how to setup joints for the whole body.

Building A Complete Human Character Rig In Maya, Global Control and Skinning.

Building A Complete Human Character Rig In Maya, Hand Controls.

Building A Complete Human Character Rig In Maya, Spinal Controls.

Building A Complete Human Character Rig In Maya, Creating The Leg Controls.

Building A Complete Human Character Rig In Maya, IK And Spline IK With Cluster Deformers.

Building A Complete Human Character Rig In Maya.

Through-out the project you'll learn how to construct the rig, skin your character and setup controllers for each body part. Author Soni Kumari will walk you through the entire process from start to finish and give you a detailed, in-depth lesson on what it takes to build a intuitive rig from scratch. Today we're kicking off a new multi-part Tuts+ premium tutorial that will teach you how to construct a complex, fully realized character rig using Maya's built in tool set.

Maya human model