Character Creation: Duck-Billed Platypus Part 4

By Stuart Brown

Rigging the Platypus was the next stage. I used the orthographic views to help construct the skeleton, the same process as the alien model. The difference with this character is that he is more complex, and also required a tail bone, belly bone, and more joint chains for toes and fingers.

Once I completed the skeleton I started adding controls, having to also consider how controls would work for the tail and belly. I model was much more difficult than the alien also because he is larger and broader, meaning he required extra thought to accommodate his build. 

I then colour coded the rig to make it easier to see, the left side being blue, the right red, and any in the middle yellow. I did this by going into the attribute editor, the drop down menu of drawing, and ticked enable overrides. I simply then changed the colours.

I ran into some trouble when freezing the transformations as the locators seemed to increase in size. Temporarily I froze them anyway, deleted the history and reduced them to 0.2 in scale rather than 1 to make the model easier to work with. 

The next stage I did was parent the controls. When doing this I realised that the skeleton of the tail was child of the root, and thought this would make more sense to be child of the Hip dislocate as it needs to move with this joint, so I changed this and reduced the joints in the tail, using it more like a third leg.

Next I used the constraints Orient, Aim and Point for the control points to control the skeleton.  For these I always pressed maintain offset and all axis, but for the elbows where I only selected Y. 

The next stage was to use IK Handles on the legs. There is two options, Rotate Plane Solver, and Single Chain Solver. RP allows the joint to move in a direction, so I used this for the leg and the SC for the toes, and also the tail. I then parented the IK handles to the foot and tail controls. I used the parent constraint on the knees by parenting the locator and leg IK handles. 

I then clicked on the root of the skeleton, right clicked and pressed 'select hierarchy', held shift and selected the geometry and pressed Skin>Bind Skin>Smooth Bind. The next stage of this model is to start painting the weights. The resolution to the locator scale issues was to click on the locator, and change its locator attributes found in the attribute editor to 0.2 from 1.