Rig
At the moment my man bat’s rig is fairly simple apart from the left hand and wing which has been rigged with more joints as well as the head which has been prepared for advanced control/shape blending for facial features.
Controls
To make animation easier I’ve added multiple controls to various parts of the rig as well as multiple driven attributes. For my rig I have made multiple controls for various sections of the torso/spine, the arm/wing and legs. Controls are simplified objects or shapes that can be easily accessed by an animator instead of them having to select individual IKhandles or joints which speeds up animation. Controls have their own positions and rotations, separate to the joints that are parented to them, which can be reset to 0 at any time to return them to their original position instead of recording joint values and manually changing each one to reset them.
Driven attributes
Driven attributes are attributes such as position and rotation that are affected by another value, for example my characters wing has its rotation and position values changed when sliding a value on the wing control. These driven keys can allow you to easily transition between positions such as folding a wing or bending fingers into a fist similarly to how blendshapes work for facial features, saving a lot of time in the animation process.
