Ninja Skeleton

This is the skeleton for my ninja in his stood-idle pose. I wasn't too happy with my rigging and it's something I've resolved to practice in the future in order to perfect it. I was able to animate the character perfectly fine, but at times I found my rig confusing. Here I'll outline some of my problems and my workarounds or solutions for them.

I do partially blame it on circumstances beyond my understanding. What should have been a simple fix of parenting one joint to another often resulted in a joint vanishing entirely for no apparent reason, and thus made it hard to fully rig the model without losing vital skeleton parts.

I encountered the same problem in my alien rig, meaning there is likely something I am missing out or doing incorrectly when it comes to the earlier stages of rigging. It was a much better idea than have parts of the skeleton missing entirely.

On the other hand it didn't make it impossible to rig; it just meant that I had to animate it differently than I otherwise could, and even in such circumstances I would probably animate it the way I did regardless, as I didn't take much note of the problem because it didn't interfere much at all with my animating.

For example, tilting the head backwards with the neck joint resulted the character (for whatever strange reason) turning it's head around 180 degrees. To avoid this, I simply adjusted the head with the head controller.

Another problem I had, but before animating, was particular vertices in the chest moving when the shoulders were adjusted. It goes without saying that this gave me a fair bit of confusion but it was the result of some of the vertices not having any influence on them. After painting influence on them to joints more relevant to the vertices locations, e.g the spine controllers, it was an easy fix.

So all in all I learned that my rigging is still hardly perfect, but when it comes to animating it can do the job; I also learned a little about the rig's problems each time I produced a new animation and so updated it slightly for each animation, e.g some of the controllers not paired to each other.