Neck Setup

Brief description of the neck setup:

Down the neck theres two joint chains, an FK and IK setup. The IK has a spline Ik running through it, and the arrowed pointers have a joint each parented below them which are skinned to the IK spline (could have used clusters but opted for this method instead.

The FK chain will be responsible for posing the head and has the FK controllers parented under the end joints. This way the FK can control the fine tweaking. 

Going back to the reference video, I wanted the head and the body to have independant movement (ie to be able to move the head and the body stay still and vice versa). This will be determined by two seperate controllers, the first will be on the root bone. This will control the birds torso position whilst planting the feet (bringing the leg IK into play). I will then create a locator control that will be positioned at the head controllers origin. Previously I did a little tester involving an arm orient - where the animator had the ability to rotate the torso, and decide how the arm should follow (whether it rotated with the torso or held its rotational position) through orient constraints and weighting.

 My head planter will be parent constrained to both the root controller and the head controller. When the control is set to head, the animator will be able to move the root around and the head will remain planted - there's no stretch on the neck, so hyper-extension (moving up and down) will eventually cause the head to move. This is unavoidable, but the footage I have shows the body tends to move side to side; if this is the case the curve length will not extend and the head will stay rooted.

Here's the neck/head setup complete, and showing the attributes for the hip controller. As you can see from the channel box, i've added an enum attribute labelled "head" and "body". Primarily, the animator will want to work in "body" mode so the head follows the body, but there will be occasions where they will wish to switch over to head and give it that sort of body wobble motion. The outliner shows the parent constraint, wired between the head locator and the end FK joint. the head locator will be parented under the main animation control so it moves with the rest of the rig. Visibility will be switched off - you don't need to see it!