Character Creation: Raccoon Part 2

By Meg Sugden
Rigging the Character
I then moved onto rigging my raccoon. This was a fairly simple process in which I followed the guides that our tutor provided for our alien models and applied the same technique to the raccoon adding in the skeleton wherever necessary. 

I started on the legs first adding in the joint chain that ran in a straight line down to the end of the toes before mirroring it across to the other leg, ensuring that everything was named accordingly. 

I then adding the joint chain in the arms, ensuring that I had enough joints in the fingers and thumb, so that they could grab an object, or at least move more, before renaming them and mirroring the joints across.

I then moved onto the spine/back, creating the joint chain that would move the spine of the character. At this stage I had to change mine slightly as I have an extra joint in the stomach to make it move up and down smoothly and also a few running up the tail to get movement in that if we wanted, even though the model is sat down.

I then moved onto adding in some extra joints. The first being the clavicle, which sat just in between the should joint and the top spine joint and then added in the hip dislocate as well, which just gives more movement in that area even though there isn't actually a real joint there in an animal or human.

Lastly at this stage I wanted to join everything up and parent all of the joints to make the centre of the skeleton the root joint. I did this all the way down the model to ensure that it was all connected and then moved onto adding in the facial joints. I also made sure at this stage that the hip dislocate joint was over the top of the root joint as it isn't actually a joint that needs to do anything. 

Lastly I moved onto the facial joint chain, which included the jaw to make his mouth open, the eye controls so they can move and then the eyebrow control so we can add in some expression. The eyebrow joint is a little unnecessary because his eyebrows are actually under his hat, but I added them anyway as the hat would move up with them and this give it that little bit more comedic value.