Building the Neck, Head, and Hair Bones

In this lesson, you'll finish the bone structure by creating the neck, head, and hair bones.

Prepare the scene:

Open the scene you saved from the previous lesson, or open tut_char_bone_file04.max.
Select all the bones, helpers, and IK chains, and hide them.
If necessary, click Min/Max Toggle to display four viewports.

Create the final bones:

On the Create panel > Systems object type, click Bones to enter creation mode.
In the Bone Parameters rollout > Bone Object group, make sure the Width and Height values are set to 5.0.
Make sure that the Assign To Children check box is off.
In a side viewport, create two smaller neck bones, then one bone for the entire head, and then five more bones for the hair.
Right-click twice to end bone creation mode.
Use the Bone Tools dialog to create a color gradient for the bones and add fins as desired.
Rename the bones to the following:
- BONE_Neck01
- BONE_Neck02
- BONE_head
- BONE_Hair01
- BONE_Hair02
- BONE_Hair03
- BONE_Hair04
- BONE_Hair05

Look at the bone structure:

At this point, all of the basic bone structure for the rig is done. You can now unhide all objects to show all the bones you created.

Right-click any viewport to display the quad menu, and choose Unhide All.
Save your work as my_char_bone_complete.max.

You can also open tut_char_bone_complete.max to examine the result of this lesson.

Summary

In this tutorial, you learned to create a bone structure for a fully articulated character.

If you have never rigged a character before, you can do the rigging lessons in the Introduction to Character Rigging tutorial before rigging this character.

To learn to skin this character, see the lesson Applying Skin to the Alien.