Rigging's away!

Next part to our aliens is the rigging process, i had previously missed this lesson last year so i was a bit like arghhhh this is gonna be hard... to my surprise it is actually quite simple and dare i say it, enjoyable :) Matt took us through the basic rigging of our alien starting from the legs, we have to get into our heads which views we need to be putting joints in because otherwise the joints will be all over the place. We also NEED to remember to name the joints as we go along so as we mirror the joint it mirrors the names too so were not taking forever to name everything.
Here's the screenshots i took from the lesson and the explanations behind them -

here's the joint tool

You have to make sure that you are creating the joint in the right view or else it could turn out flat or all over the joint, mind the pun there :p

Just cause i forgot how to bring up the channel box-

great tool - mirroring joints, make sure that you name everything so that the joint names get copied too, saves so much time!

use the axis to figure out which way to mirror across if your working down the left side it will be YZ

now onto creating all the joints!

legs

arm

hand and fingers

pretty much done so now we need to parent everything together

simple as! click the child then shift select the parent then press P

remember to use layers! when i start this for real on my model i will use layers!

finished!

Now for the Controls - we want to use a round control for the likes of the body head etc...

We also want to make custom ones too for the feet etc so we can take the vertex's and move them into position. make sure you don't cross over the middle line though!

overall i found the process to be easier as i did it more and more, glad i have acquired these skills form this alien