As you build up the rig for a model, it is often helpful to create custom attributes so that you can link things to forefingerRight.curl (for example), instead of forefingerRight.rotateZ. Not only will that make your rigs a great deal easier to understand, but it also allows you to tie actions of the rig to values that are completely independent of any built-in affects such as rotation or translation.

Just as there are sometimes attributes that you will want to add to a given node, there are often attributes on a node that you know you'll never want to animate. Locking such attributes and hiding them in the channel box is another way to make your rigs easier to work with.

In this example, we'll be looking at how to do both things—adding new, custom attributes to a node and hiding undesirable or unimportant attributes from view. More specifically, we'll be hiding the rotation and scale attributes and adding some attributes of the sort...