Monday 24 October 2011

Reverse control in foot of alien

The Digital Tutors tutorial demonstrated a very simple means of creating a reverse control for a foot which involved creating a base joint at the heel, then a joint at the toe; but then going back and creating one at the ball and one at the ankle.  This would allow the animator to rotate the foot up and down, either by the heel or toe.

However, with the alien's foot, I had far more joints that I would need to control using the reverse controller.
I started at the reverse control at the heel, as the tutorial had stated, but then once I got to the toe joint, I had to go back and create joints in the reverse control for the middle of the toe, the bend, the foot and finally the ankle.
From the foot joint of the reverse control, I then created a joint to the outer toe and then its respective joints, and then another one from the outer toe bend joint to the middle toe and all of its respective child joints.

I found that this was going to be problematic when trying to rotate the foot on the toe as it would only effect the inner toe.  So because of this I decided to reparent the middle and outer toe RL joints to the foot RL joints.  In order to make the foot and reverse control match, I decided to reparent the outer toe on the foot to the foot joint.
Here is a demonstration of how the Reverse Control moves now, on both the base joint and the inner toe joint.
The next part was to create an IK handle for the leg that ran from the hip to the ankle, and also to create IK Handles for each of the joints in the foot, which would then be parented to the corresponding joints in the Reverse Control.  Here is a video of me parenting the newly created IK handles to the reverse control and also creating a few new ones in order to make the foot move more evenly.

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