Leg and Foot for Alien

The first stage of rigging this creature was to create the legs of the creature.  In the past, I had normally begun from the root joint, but I know now that it makes more sense to rig the legs separately and parent them to a root joint later on, as this would mean they would be symmetrical to one another.

I created joints in the left hip, knee, ankle, foot and a placed two joints in the inner toe.  I have decided to refer to the alien's toes as inner, middle and outer; as opposed to left, middle and right for reasons that shall become more clear later on.  I made sure that the knee joint was slightly in front on the Z axis and the ankle was slightly behind to give it that bend.

Rigging of the toes was a fairly fun job; whether they will work well remains to be seen, but I think that having a bit of bend and curl in the individual toes would look veyr nice when it came to animating, particularly walk cycles.

The inner and middle toe joints that stick out in front were created directly from the foot joint, whereas the outer toe joints were created from the ankle as this toe was closer to the back of the foot.  This outer toe also has fewer joints than the other two toes, as it is smaller and would thus make less movement, much like a thumb.

After revising the placement of the joints in this foot, I decided that it would make sense to create an extra joint, between the toe and foot joints in both the inner and middle toes.  The reason for this was that  having the toe joint directly to the foot could have meant that there would be too much influence on the mesh from two joints, meaning that both toes would bend abnormally, even if you only keyframed one to bend.

To do this, I disconnected the two joints and this automatically created two new joints in their place.  I parented the toe joints to these new joints and then moved them around so that both toes consisted on three joints; one at the foot, one in the middle toe joint and one right at the end of the toe.

In the next post, I shall go into how I created the drivers to give this foot some bend, curl and roll.