Maya DIY Controls & IK Handles

For the next part of making my own maya model, I had to add controls and some ik handles (technical terms I had no idea what they could mean!). 

However I did quickly make some eyebrows for my model which took less than 5 minutes because I had become extremely familiar with the software and all the buttons!

But then onto making the controls. These were relatively simple to make, it was just a case of getting them into the correct position and making sure they were an ideal size. I used the 'NURBS Primitives' option this time, another new step in my maya learning adventure, and sometimes chose the 'circle' option, for the central controls, or for other times I used the 'CV Curve Tool' to make my own shapes for example on the hand. 

One of the most frustrating parts of this step for me was the shoulder. I couldn't get the hang of rotating and adjusting the curvature of the 'non-linear bend' that I created and it was going all over the place! I ended up manually typing in the degrees I wanted to turn the bend into the menu on the right of the screen and this ended up doing the job! It did take me a few tries though...

Once I had done all of my controls, I did the knees which were a little different because their control came under the 'locator' option. But these were the simplest to do and in the end I didn't need to even snap them to the joints because they are only gong to be translated and not rotated.

This is what all my controls looked like before changing the centre point/adding any colour. I also decided to go ahead and clean up all of my control names so that they were much easily distinguishable. Once that was finished I froze them all and could move on to changing the control colours to more recognisable ones; red for right, blue for left and yellow for central.

Finally I added some IK handles to separate parts of my skeleton's body, for example; heel to ball of foot, hip to ankle, etc. An IK handle (stands for Inverse Kinematics) help your model actually become animated/help with the motion! In other words, this step is one closer to making your model come to life! 

Once I had done that I had finished this part of the tutorials and my model looks almost ready to be animated! For the most part, this process was straight forward, it is all about being precise and not missing stages or else something could go massively wrong in the future. But I am very happy with my progress and keeping up with the set tutorials.