making controllers and skeleton worm

This was a simpler task in someways the creating a skeleton for a biped however I did have to factor in the ribbon spline. The most important movement was the worms body, all the humour of the character was going to derive from its stupid movement. The other two important movements where the eyes and the head. I created a separate skeleton for the head, eyes and arms of the worm. I found orienting/positioning the central controllers quite difficult, this is because I still wasn't quite sure how the ribbon spline worked even though I'd successfully made one. So I was unsure what I needed to position the controllers around (joints or clusters). I ended up orienting them round the clusters however I'm still unsure if this was the right decision but it seemed to work.

It was important for some scenes that the arms could pop out of the worms body and the mouth was able to move. I was unsure how I was going to do this my original plan was just through rigging however I was told a much better and easier way was to use blend shapes. I had to make a different blend shape for each movement I wanted to achieve, there were five movements. The results created from this were perfect and created some great movement. Creating a good blend for the thumb and arm was difficult however I found it was a lot easier to do it by snap verts in un-smoothed view. I used set driven keys for the blend shapes and put them onto relevant controllers for when I wanted to animate them. The set driven keys allowed a much greater range of in betweens in the motion of the blend shapes.