Little Pig rig is not quite right. Advice?

http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=45910

Hey All!

Here is a little piggy I’v been working on. I’m pretty new to Blender, but I’m pleased with the way this guy has turned out. I started with a clay model, took pictures, and created my mesh from those. It work really well!

There are a couple things that bug me about him though, and was wondering if you guys might bless me with your infinite blender knowledge to bring this model from “okay” to “perfect”

  1. the forearm rotation. When I move the hands, the forearms tend to get twisted, and pinch up at the elbows and wrists. I can fix this most times by selecting the forearm bone and rotating it, but I feel like I shouldn’t have to do that. I tried setting a constraint that tied it as a child to the hand control, but that didn’t work right either. Any advice on this? I’m guessing I have to change my mesh up a bit.

  2. dislocation. I would like to make it so that the hands and feet didn’t become dislocated as they moved around. I thought about creating duplicates of the shin and forearm bones and flipping them head-to-tail, then parenting that bone to the foot and hand controls, but then how would I join the duplicate forearm and shin bones so they moved as one? and for that matter, how do I join the bone at the base of the spine with its doppelgänger so that they move as one? any ideas?

  3. Custom shape bones. As you can see from this blend, I have started making custom shape bones (is that what they’re called?) for the bones in my armature. I have one in there, the head bone. Is there a right way to do this? and what about those cool shapes I’ve seen where you slide a thing back and forth and it makes the fingers bend, how do you make one of those?

That’s all the questions I can think of right now. anyone who has any ideas about how to make this model work better, I would love to hear from you, even if it is about something I haven’t listed above. Thanks so much!

Check out Dans tutorials on this.

Thanks! which tutorial do you mean? the link leads to a lot of them