Skeleton and skin of an alien

So this is the part of the process that was the most complicated for me in an over all view. From the beginning having to think where the joints go sounds easy as we can reflect the joints that we have, but it is pretty easy to over look at some other movements that normally I wouldn't even consider as important (for arm roll and the clavicles for example).
At some point here I got left behind from the rest of the class as I understood something completely different in one lecture. Luckily I was able to catch up thanks to the video guides we had made.

After making the skeleton, we had to constrain them one another, think of a hierarchy in which the react in relation to the whole structure and identify key joints for certain movements. All this at the same time as making sure that everything was properly named and organized as any mistake at this point would be pretty dramatic and complicated to come back later on to fix it. After the joints where orient and parent constrained, we then moved to create some controllers or handles to avoid having to move the skeleton itself. Master control, jaw and a large number of NURBs circles where created and placed on position, making sure the pivot points were set on the appropriate joint.

The whole process itself was pretty intimidating, specially for the amount of detail that you have to put on. Also knowing that the next step was skin weight painting and that if anything was wrong with the rig, the only way to come back and fix it is to delete all work done in the weight skin process; now that put a lot of pressure to make everything right on the first go.

So after soft binding the skin to the rig, the big job of weight paint the skin come into place. This is basically to determine  how much influence each joint has over each vertex of the character. So it is a case of try and test; paint a bit, bend, see how react and modify according to the elasticity of the skin in relation of the deformation desire when animating. Long story short, it is hard work, and from this depends a lot of the final look of the character. This is why, after doing a big work on the weight skin painting it's really painful to find a problem with the rig that will cause you to unbind the skin, fix the skeleton, then bind it again and repeat the long process.