Rigging the hips

Moving onto the hip region, I’ll give you a general idea of what I normally do to rig the hips:

1. Selecting the thigh bone, paint the whole of the upper leg.

   Figure 5.19 shows some very rough weights, which is how my weights start out before I go ahead and refine them.

Figure 5.19 – The thigh weights started

2. Selecting the base of the spine, paint a rough belt where you expect the legs to bend. It doesn’t need to be too precise for now; use the smoothing tool to smooth any rough work later. Figure 5.19 shows my rough work for the hips:

Figure 5.20 – The rough groin area weights

3. Then, smooth out all the weights between the leg and spine to clean things up and get a better idea of what’s going on.
4. Push the leg into some stress positions, and when you encounter any positions that do not look right, hold the leg there and edit your weights to your desired...