Legs

The leg works in a very similar way to the arm. There are three control points on the leg. They correspond to the hip, the knee and the ankle.

Dragging the ankle control point

Dragging the ankle control point allows you to move the whole leg at once. Just drag the ankle to where you want the character's foot to be, and all other parts of the leg will follow it.

Rotating the ankle control point

Rotating the ankle control point has the same effect as rotating your own ankle joint. You can rotate the ankle along 3 axis. (For how to rotate a joint in general, see our Two ways of posing tutorial)

Dragging the knee control point

Dragging the knee control point works in the same way as dragging the elbow control point. It allows you to move the knee position while keeping the ankle and the hip stay in the same position. It has a "twisting" effect on the whole leg:

Rotating the knee control point

Rotating the knee control point has the same effect of rotating the knee joint. You can only rotate the knee along one axis:

Dragging the hip control point

Dragging on the hip control point allows you to tilt the pelvis:

Rotating the hip control point

Rotating the hip control point has the same effect of rotating the hip joint. You can rotate the hip control point along 3 axis:

Tricky poses involving the leg

Side split

A common pose that many people get wrong is the "side split". Intuitively, many people will rotate the hip joint sideways and make a pose like this:

Although the problem here is not obvious, this pose is not possible to achieve with a realistic human. Take another look of the picture of real woman above: You will notice that her toes are pointing upwards, not to the front! This is because the rotation of the hip joint sideways works in a very special way. The direction of the toes makes a dramatic difference: turning the toes outward permits a considerably bigger range than pointing them forward. This article of "Human Anatomy Fundamentals" from Joumana Medlej on tutsplus.com explains it very clearly with great pictures! We recommend you reading it!

Therefore, the correct way to make the side split pose is to first rotate the hip outwards, and then rotate it sideways.

Moreover, as mentioned in the tutsplus article above, you will also see pictures of people doing the side split with their toes pointed forward. In this case, be sure to check out their back and pelvis. Their back is inevitably arched and their pelvis is tilted forward. This means they're really doing a toes-up split, but the pelvic bone along with the legs and feet are tilted forward.

You can use the waist control point and pelvis control point to arch the back and tilt the pelvis. Please refer to the Torso tutorial if you need more help on how to do that!

High side kick

Similar to the side split, another tricky pose with the leg is the high side kick. One common mistake is to simply rotate the hip joint to bring the leg high sideways:

What's wrong in this case? If you keep your upper body straight, you cannot possibly raise your leg up to reach your head. Take another look at the reference picture above of a real woman. Her pelvis is tilted a lot sideways. You can think about the side kick roughly as a side split, but rotated by 90 degrees.

The correct way to make a side kick pose is to first rotate the pelvis control point by almost 90 degrees, then rotate the hip control joint to bring the leg straight up. To make the character balanced and not fall, you also need to arch the character's back by dragging the waist control point, so that there's a continuous body-leg line through the character's pose (For details, please refer to the "Side kick" section of this article on tutsplus.com).

The correct end result looks like this from front and back: