Creating a Basic Human Rig Part 4: Head, Neck, & Final

Grouping
Following on from where I last left off with the rig, I then looked
at adding in the head, neck, eyes and mouth joints to the rig.

To do this I created new joints holding down X to

snap them to the grid and looked at creating 3 joints
that will then parent to the centre neck joint 1
(selecting neck joint 2 first then neck joint 1 after.)
From there I then looked at creating the lower jaw for the rig, through another two creating joints and
renaming them (see above). From there I then parented the lower jaw 1 joint to the head joint 1. I then
proceeded by creating the eye joint and then parenting it to the same head joint. With this I then mirrored
the joint using the options window below to copy and rename said joint.
From there I then created curves arrow similar to the pole vectors and aligned it with neck joint
1, making sure to V snap the arrow to the required position and then D, V snap the pivot point
to the neck joint 1. this was then duplicated and then snapped above to the head joint 1.

Controls were renamed and then the history was deleted and transformations frozen.
I then constrained point and orient the neck controls to the neck and head joints 1.

And then looked at parenting the

controls to neck controls, making
sure to also parent to the
chest/spine controls for full
functionality and to keep the
hierarchy of joint and operations in
place.
Moving forward I then add a new attribute to the neck 2
control and named it ‘LOWER JAW OC’. From there I then
brought up the connection editor and looked at connecting
the lower jaw joint to the lower jaw open close attribute in
the neck 2 control. With this connected the lower jaw joint
to the rotate Z in the control so now it only moves up and
down.
Here I also edited the lower jaw attribute by adding in
limitations to its movability through the max and minimum
values. Once done I then went through and removed any
channel that weren’t needed - these being the translates
and scale options in the command box – this was repeated
on both arrows.
1
I then proceeded by grouping up the controls and joints in
the outliner for a cleaner workspace (new groups seen above
2 and on the side).

4
Then adding a nurbs circle for the main control
and looked at connecting it in the connection
editor by linking up the translate, rotates and
scales to their corresponding counter parts.
Once done I then grouped them angina and
renamed the new group to character tig do not
touch.