I've skinned my character now and made some more changes to the rig. Turns out fat characters with clothes are really hard to skin.

As I told Nicholas in an e-mail, there are still a few issues:

• Knees/legs twist a lot. This seems to be because of the geometry? Not sure, don't know how to fix it. If you pull out the knees and pull his feet forward, they straighten out some.
• Arms/shirt - elbow area. No idea how to handle this - the shirt is RIGHT at the elbow bend. Right now the geometry penetrates.
• Clothes separate at some parts if you move the character too far.

I added curvy C-shaped spine controls - Nicholas agreed that the rings might be too cluttered, but I figured these would be easier to grab from more angles than the lollipop controls.

I've sent another draft to Nicholas that has the IK/FK switch included and a few more changes.

There are still a few issues I'm working on -

• Controls a bit ugly (IK/FK switch is just a circle above the elbows, FK controls for arms not placed very well).
• Need to add spine controls. In an earlier e-mail, I believe Nicholas requested rings. However, the torso of the character is getting a little messy, so I've asked him if he still would prefer rings or if lollipop controls would be acceptable. 
• Thumb controls still rotate weirdly, don't know why.

I obviously also need to skin the character. I have cut away and hidden some of his geometry, which should help the penetration issue that would have arisen otherwise.

I've got a draft of the rig that I've sent to Nicholas. Here are some screenshots showing the setup.

Full view

Reverse Foot Lock (joints hidden)

There are still several issues I have to work out, as I told Nicholas. They are:

• The hands have rotated strangely because of the elbow pole vector - I haven't been able to fix this yet 
• The thumb ring controls will not align the way the others have, I need to fix the orientations here or something
• I would like to add an IK/FK switch (the rig is currently only IK)
• Potentially add finger controls to select the whole finger (an easier way to do a finger curl)

Also, I have not yet skinned the character. I'll work on that after I've gotten the rig more finished.

Here's my first attempt at placing joints for the promoter character. I'm a little unsure about the neck area because, well, he doesn't really have one. There also isn't exactly a defined jaw/chin because of his fat, so I'm not sure how his jaw should work.

This is the model we will be using, the promoter:

I have talked with Nicholas some about the types of features he likes to see in rigs. He replied with the following information with screenshots of various rigs and the particular aspects he likes.

"On the morpheus rig spine there are lolly pop controls for IK and rings around his ribs for FK. I prefer to animate in IK and the rings are more easily clicked on and I would like the spine controls to be the rings."

"The hand controls on this rig work great. I like the individual control over each finger and the ability to control the palm independently of the fingers. For the finger controls I would like selectable rings around the joints of each finger to more easily control the fingers. "

"I really like the side display of this rig. The ability to modify the face and limbs here is helpful at times. Having an "ALL" button to select the full character is very helpful in the beginning of the animation process, and having it listed here is great."

"The toe twist and wiggle are great on this rig. This is a function I don't think would be used a lot but is helpful in some climbing scenes and dancing. "

"I have a lot of trouble with the shoulder controls on rigs. The geometry often breaks. I like the simply control on this rig for the shoulder. This control pictured only goes from front to back but if it rotated and went side to side I think the simplicity would work great."

He has also mentioned that having squash and stretch in the limbs would be helpful. I will use this information as a basis for my rig, but probably will not have time to implement everything. These give me a good idea of which things might be most important and what I can focus most on.