In today’s lab session we created a simple set of armatures, and then applied the same technique to a full body model. An armature acts as the characters skeleton; by incorporating this we can ‘rig’ characters and move their limbs, allowing us to place them into different positions. There are several different types, giving us control in the ways we feel we need. Deform bones are the default in armatures, this allows us to freely move the vertices contained in a limb. B-Bones are bones broken into different pieces, giving the character more flexibility, the more we have the more we can detail we can incorporate into the pose. If there are only a few then the movement will be much more restricted. We can change the level of influence by implementing contraints, which are basically restrictions that make movements by a bone dependent on another object. These are the main areas we explored, creating an extremely basic arm with two bones. The first bone acts as the tip of the arm to the elbow, and the second bone from the elbow to shoulder. Manipulating the second bone allowed us to move the bone in the way the bone would normally act, but obviously we were restricted to what we could do. After creating a very basic armature (screenshots as usual below) we moved onto creating a full characters skeleton. Creating the armatures and then assigning these ‘bones’ to vertices achieved this. We used the simplest method, envelopes, to assign these bones, and although the process was fast it left us with several problems. The main one we encountered was when we tried to move the bones ‘too’ much, the vertices deformed and crossed with other vertices, leaving us with some rather unpleasant results! A much more effective way of doing this is to use weight painting on the vertices.

When in envelope mode we were able to see the area of influence on the bones. The pink and yellow areas are under full influence, so any deformations made to the bones will directly affect the ones covered. The pale white areas we can see have a gradated influence, any bones in this area will be partially influenced when bone transformations are made. This initially left us with a few problems, and we felt that even though the character could be placed in poses, the overall outcome was less than satisfactory.