Maya Rigging Basics | Joints

Create joint chains in Maya and understand how their parent-child relationships determine motion. This introductory lesson uses a simple leg and spine to explain placement, chain direction and joining separate branches. It does not bind a character mesh or build an IK handle; those are later steps. The exact Maya version is unverified.

Create a chain and inspect its hierarchy

At 00:00, switch to the Rigging menu set and choose Create Joints from the Skeleton tools, or use the corresponding shelf icon. Each viewport click adds another joint. Finish with Enter so subsequent actions do not keep extending the chain.

At 01:05, inspect the result in the Outliner. What looks like one connected skeleton is a hierarchy of separate joints. Expanding each item individually becomes slow on a long chain; the instructor holds Shift while expanding the parent to reveal all its descendants.

Use the Outliner to confirm which item is the root and which joints follow it. A visible connecting segment helps explain the relationship, but the transform and hierarchy belong to the joints themselves.

Place the joints in more than one view

At 02:03, the instructor deletes the first demonstration chain and starts a leg-like arrangement in a side view. In the perspective-placement setup shown, new joints land on the construction plane rather than automatically finding the intended depth inside a character.

A joint can therefore look aligned from one camera while being misplaced in another dimension. Orthographic views make the placement easier to inspect: establish the leg profile from the side, then check its lateral position from the front.

At 05:04, the hip is correctly placed in height but remains on the center plane. While still using the joint tool, middle-mouse drag repositions the current joint before the next one is created. The instructor alternates views and repeats this for the knee, ankle, foot and toes.

The example has no skin geometry to validate placement against. Its purpose is to demonstrate multi-view construction, not establish anatomical joint positions for a particular model. Inspect each new point before extending the chain, because its position influences the relationships you will rotate later.

Choose chain direction to match the intended FK behavior

At 03:05, rotate and move joints to observe inheritance. Moving a parent affects its children. Moving the knee affects the joints below it without moving the hip above it.

At 04:02, a reversed construction beginning at the toes illustrates a different hierarchy: rotating that root carries the rest of the chain upward from the foot. That is usually not the desired starting relationship for the simple FK leg being demonstrated.

For this example, build the chain from the upper leg toward the toes so rotation propagates down the limb. The lesson introduces IK as later work that will let a target near the foot influence the limb’s solved rotations. This should not be read as physically reversing the parent-child hierarchy: the target-driven behavior and the hierarchy are different concepts, and no IK setup is constructed here.

Test the knee and hip separately. The expected observation is a different set of descendants moving for each selection, rather than the entire skeleton responding identically to every joint.

Parent separate chains into a branching skeleton

At 07:03, create a spine chain separately, then parent the leg root under the intended pelvis joint. A connecting segment appears between the joined joints. The resulting skeleton now contains branches that extend in different spatial directions while sharing a parent.

At 08:01, expand the hierarchy again to inspect those branches. The small sphere-like markers identify the actual joints; the connecting shapes communicate their parenting. A connection’s visual direction is not a separate joint that must be animated.

Rotate the shared parent and inspect both branches, then rotate a joint within one branch and inspect its descendants. These are useful checks that the hierarchy matches the intended control behavior before adding skinning or IK.

The completed exercise is a small connected skeleton with inspectable parent-child motion. Precise joint orientation, naming, skin weights, constraints and final animation controls are outside this lesson’s demonstrated scope.