Spine Rigging control

[Steban]

hi, i want to know what is the best way to control spine bones, i was told that i need to create external controls that manipulates each bone, but i've seen some videos, where people use controls right between to spine bones, like circle shapes, that seem to have more control over a section of the spine.
and, better or not, can anyone tell me how do i do the second way?

[Kitana]

I have the same question in my mind - I watched in tutorial that they use Spline IK solver for linking all bones and shape line with them -(I didn't understood why is this line) and this makes little control boxes near every bone which you can manipulate instead the bones and I suppose they link somehow this boxes with shapes like circles out of the body. But I still don't know how.

Edit: After they use position and orientation constraint which links the boxes near the bones and the shapes you want out of the body. That's the whole process I found. I hope this will help you. I prefer to animate with controllers too.

[poopipe]

I tend to make my spine, neck, tail and tentacle rigs much as kitana describes, you can drive a lot of bones smoothly with just a few controllers and you can give the animator a choice of both fk and ik control very easily.

The benefit of spline ik is that it gives you full 3 dimensional movement, the other HI ik solvers only operate in a 2d plane and cannot bend "backwards" which is no good for flexible objects such as a spine.

You do need to be careful to use an upnode or the chain can flip when the rig is rotated but beyond that its a pretty robust and very quick solution