Creating joints and joint chains

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There are a number of ways to create joints. In Maya.

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First, we can use the main menus.

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We need to make sure the menu set is set to rigging. So we can see the skeleton menu.

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Now, we can see it. We simply move down to create joints and open the options,

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just reset this. So it's back to the default settings.

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So here we have the main options associated with creating joints and joint chains.

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You'll notice that the mouse pointer has now changed to a

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cross hair which indicates we are in joint creation mode.

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What I like to do is snap the joints to the grid just to keep things neat and tidy

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to do this. I can simply hold down X

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which will activate grid snapping.

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You can also see the button being activated up here.

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What I can do now is click anywhere

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and the joint will snap to the closest grid point

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I can then click over here and create a second joint

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and then a third

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to complete the joint chain.

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I just press enter and then we drop out of joint creation mode.

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Here we have a simple joint chain with each

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joint being automatically parented to the one before it,

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you can see the hierarchy in the outliner.

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So that is one way to create joints.

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The next is to use the rigging shelf.

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The create joint button is here

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and to open the options, we simply double click it.

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You can also see the last used tool is shown here for quick access

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and we can create joints just as before.

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Finally, you can hold down space to access the skeleton menu through the hot box.