Rigging the hips
Moving onto the hip region, I’ll give you a general idea of what I normally do to rig the hips:
- Selecting the thigh bone, paint the whole of the upper leg.
Figure 5.19 shows some very rough weights, which is how my weights start out before I go ahead and refine them.
Figure 5.19 – The thigh weights started
- Selecting the base of the spine, paint a rough belt where you expect the legs to bend. It doesn’t need to be too precise for now; use the smoothing tool to smooth any rough work later. Figure 5.19 shows my rough work for the hips:
Figure 5.20 – The rough groin area weights
- Then, smooth out all the weights between the leg and spine to clean things up and get a better idea of what’s going on.
- Push the leg into some stress positions, and when you encounter any positions that do not look right, hold the leg there and edit your weights to your desired...
