while going through all the different rig setups of my character, the spine needs specific attention, too. later on, i’ll dig into a full rig, but for now i just want to note down certain parts in order to take a more concentrated look at problems you may encounter.
set a series of bones right above your center of gravity (cog). the start joint (which i named spineBase_jnt, spine01_jnt etc. and the last one spineTop_jnt) should not be the center of gravity itself else you won’t have enough control over it: since we’ll use the ik spline solver, the cog wouldn’t be controllable on its own as spline ik’s can only be controlled through the generated spline itself (unlike regular ik controls).
now set the spline ik by going to skeleton > ik spline handle tool and selecting the lowest joint first and the topmost one afterwards. now a spline should be visible which can be adjusted in component mode (f8 and then moving the control points around). as you don’t want to animate your character’s spine with just those cv’s, clusters are necessary (a cluster is a deformer in maya which gives you control over a set of cv’s). create a cluster for every cv (animation > deform > create cluster), they’ll appear as a ‘c’ icon which you now can use as control. be sure you set the creation mode to relative else your controls will not follow when transforming.
that’s basically all you need. here are some optimization proposals:
- if you’d like to have a cv for every joint (which i personally like), just rebuild the curve (edit curves > rebuild curve) and add/ remove as many spans as you require. be sure you’re in object mode when rebuilding the curve.
- if your cv is very near to the spline curve it may become near to unselectable. turn on the display handle of the cluster in the attribute editor and enter transformation values in the according entry fields. the handle now resides outside and is much better selectable.