The Arm

After creating the spine, I move onto the arm — I create these Skelegons in the back view to help orient the rotation of the elbow on the pitch. Note that I often use a tiny bone on the shoulder joint to give me a small 'ball joint' type effect. Splitting the control of a joint, such as the shoulder, is useful in avoiding the effect of Gimbal Lock when a bone's Pitch is rotated 90 degrees, causing the other two axes to lock in the same plane.

I also create a small Skelegon for the wrist — This bone will control the hand movement from the wrist, and is usually created in the top view to orient the pitch correctly.

The Hands

The fingers come next — I select the wrist Skelegon and draw each finger as a long Skelegon to the beginning of the finger, then each knuckle joint. I do this in the top view, again to help ensure that the pitch orientation is around each knuckle.

The thumb is similar, except that the thumb on a hand tends to be on almost a 45 degree angle. The orientation of these Skelegons can be tweaked easily using the bank handle.

The Leg

The Leg is next and is created in the back or front view, for, you guessed it, making sure that the orientation of the knee is on the pitch. I also tend to model in a tiny bone at the hip joint, for the same reason I do in the shoulder. Like the arm, the ankle is also a tiny bone at the end of the lower leg.

The Foot

The foot is created from the end of the ankle — This is done usually from the top view, for pitch orientation purposes. Note that a bone is extended from the ankle to the ball of the foot, then a toe and heel bone are added. There are numerous rigging concepts for feet, however this layout of bones is quite stable, and can also be used later to create a reverse-heel rig setup in Layout. (I'll cover that concept in a future tutorial)

Creating the whole skeleton

Once both the arm and leg are created, they are selected and simply mirrored to create the opposite side of the skeleton.

Make sure that 'Merge points' is on to take care of connecting the other half of the skeleton to the spine. It also pays to just double-check all points where limbs are connected down the spine, just to be sure.

The Eyeballs

The final tweak that I made to this model before saving it was to set the pivot point of the two eyeball layers using the View > Layers > Pivot tool. I tend to keep my eyeballs separate from the base object, however some users prefer to rig eyeballs using bones and weightmaps.

Saving the model at this stage is a good idea before we move onto the next section. The model at this stage is ready for setup in Layout as it stands and we'll look at just how that's done in part 2 of this tutorial.

Note that unlike many of the other commercial 3D applications on the market that use weightmaps for setting up how the geometry works with bones, LightWave is not dependant upon them and can actually create quite good deformation without them at all, however the option is there for those who prefer to use them.

If rigging using weightmaps are your thing, then let's continue.