E4 Ident Progress (Maya) - Adding Controllers To My Character

After i rigged my character and made sure all the joints were oriented correctly i then started on the controllers for the joints. These controllers are what i am going to use to pose my model for animating. To position the controller accurately with the joint's axis i created a group for the controller and parented the group to the joint, then i zero out the translation values and the controller is now aligned with the joint's axis. This works because the group adopts the values of the joint in relation to where the group is so when the translation values are zeroed out it returns to the joint's location. the actual controller can be moved wherever as long as the pivot point of the controller is still in the middle of the joint. I then used an orient constraint to connect the controllers to the joints.

To make the joints move properly with each other i used the outliner to parent the controller groups to joints higher up the hierarchy. The fingers and the feet are at the bottom of the hierarchy whereas the root joint where everything is connected to is at the top of the hierarchy.