Hello,
I think the spine is one of the most interesting areas of a character to try to rig, there’s no standardised method I’ve come across for setting it up. I’ve just come out of university and don’t have any industry experience so I’m not really sure what sort of controls animators like to work with, so I’m just testing out a lot of different things.
I uploaded a file to Hotfile containing both spine rigs, here’s the link: https://hotfile.com/dl/249181482/ad2f536/TwoSpines.zip.html
The first one was inspired by the Biped spine when in Twist Links Mode and the CAT spine when in Animation Mode and must be used in Gimbal mode; with the uppermost control selected you can rotate it side-to-side and front-and-back and it controls the rotation of all the bones in the spine, the lowermost control does a similar thing but the rotations start at the bottom and propagate up the spine. It seem that my rig has a few advantages over Biped and CAT: it doesn’t flip and the spine doesn’t move when twisted (not always the case with CAT) and the twisting is always distributed evenly along the spine (not always the case with Biped) and both CAT and Biped lack the lower control I introduced. Obviously there is gimbal locking issues, but they’re present in CAT and Biped too. There are hidden controls which allow for individual FK rotations, but I they don’t work 100% with the upper and lower controls.
The second one is a straight copy of the spine that’s implemented in the Malcolm Rig by AnimSchool, it’s a very simple FK set up the secondary rotations controls to avoid gimbal locking and tertiary controls to allow for stretching.
Please tell me what you think, if there’s anything that could be added or improved.
Thanks,
-Harry