Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating the Armature
As of now, we have the mesh of the character that we are going to animate, but there is a
part missing: The "skeleton structure" that will allow us to perform the actual animaion
task. This "skeleton structure" is called an "armature" in Blender and the first task that we
are going to do is just creaing its components; later on we will work on seing it up for our
purposes.
Engage Thrusters
1.
To a d d To u r a r m a t u r e , l e t ' is e in is u r e t h a t w e a re i in
Object Mode
and the 3D cursor is
located at the 3D world origin (
View → Align View → Center Cursor and View All
or press
Shift + C
).
2.
Now let's go to
Add → Armature → Single Bone
. This will leave us with a long
octahedron located right between the feet of our character. Let's change the name
of the armature to
char_skel
(
Item
panel,
Properties Sidebar
) and switch to
Edit
Mode
for the armature object.
The
armature
is a special kind of object in Blender. It is composed of "bones"
that are modifiable when in
Edit Mode
. Each bone has two "ips", called
tip
(thinner part of the octahedron) and
root
(thicker part of the octahedron).
Another special aspect of armatures is that they have an extra mode called
Pose
Mode
, used for some of the setup tasks and also for the actual animaion.
3. Select the enire bone that is created by default (right-click in the middle of it),
duplicate it (
Armature
→
Duplicate
), and move it up around 1.9 units (
G
key,
Z
key, then type
1.9
) to get it inside the torso of our character.
4.
As we need to see the bones and they must be located inside the volume of our
mesh, let's enable X-Ray visualizaion of the bones. Let's go to the
Object Data
tab of the
Properties Editor
and check the
X-Ray
opion in the
Display
panel.
Remember that the 3D viewport must have solid shading enabled (
Z
key, once or
twice).
The duplicated bone is the staring one for a 'chain' of bones forming the spine of
the armature.
