After you model the surfaces that make up a human, animal, or other character, you create a skeleton and bind it to the character’s surface (called skin).

A skeleton provides a structure for animating the character. When you create a skeleton in Maya, you create a series of bones with joints in the skeletal locations where you want the character to bend or twist. (You can animate a skeleton without having a skinned character.)

In this lesson, you learn the techniques for creating a simple skeleton for a human character. You will learn how to:

• Create joints for a character.
• Name joints in the Hypergraph.
• Use symmetry when creating a character.
• Parent joints into an existing skeleton.
• Use Inverse Kinematics (IK) techniques to pose a skeleton.

Learning how to bind a character to a skeleton is described in the next lesson.