Final Rig Adjustments

When we created Kila's rig, we had to keep the elbow and knee position markers locked to the elbow and knee joints. This was to prevent the base skeleton moving before it was bound. As you have probably noticed, this can cause problemsespecially in the case of the knee icons being actually on the knee. When you move the foot, the knee tries to stay pointing at the icon, causing the leg to flip.

Now that the mesh is bound to the skeleton, we can move these knee icons into more suitable positions.

1.	Move the knee position icons out in front of the knees (Figure 14.43, left). Figure 14.43. Move the knee icons and parent them to the feet.
2.	Make a note of the Rotate Y attributes currently set for both feet (you will need to reapply these values later). Reset the Rotate Y attribute on both feet back to 0 so that the feet point exactly forward (Figure 14.43, middle).
3.	Parent each knee icon to its corresponding foot icon.
4.	Freeze the transforms on both knee icons and reset the Y rotation on both feet icons back to their original values.

NOTE

It's important to again reset the feet back to 0 before you pass the completed rig to the animators. This will give them a clean rig to work with. Setting it to 0 now, however, will mean the character is no longer in her bind pose, which could cause problems later when we bind the LODs.

Now the knees will naturally follow the feet as they move (Figure 14.43, right). Plus, you have the ability to tweak the knees' positions should you need to.

We can also do this same adjustment for the elbow positions. Like the knees, the arms will flip when the IK is enabled, to stay pointing at the icons. Moving the elbows back slightly will prevent this from happening (Figure 14.44). In this instance, we don't need to parent them to anything; just freeze the transforms when you have finished moving them, to store their new default positions.

Figure 14.44. Move the elbow position icons back.

NOTE

Consult with the animators about how they would like the pole vector icons set up. It may be that they should all be parented to a certain node, or not parented at all.

The main Kila model is now bound and ready to go to the next and final stage, but what about the other LODs?