After being significantly delayed, due to me overshooting the planned deadline for the mech by a few weeks, I finally began working on my mech's rig. I feel fairly confident as a rigger hence I wanted to give my mech all the functionality it needs for my trailer i.e finger controls. But before I start on the complex features I needed to establish a basic humanoid rig first.
As soon as I imported my mech into maya I realized I had made a critical mistake; the mech was standing bolt upright. before I could even start creating the joints for the mech I needed to relax its position to allow the IKs (inverse kinematics) to function correctly.
Once I had relaxed the model I could begin creating the joints necessary for my mech. As I had went with a design that tries to re-create the human spine, I needed to create joints for each individual vertebrae to allow for the correct motion. For the rest of the mech I created joints similar to any other humanoid for the basic motion required.