Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
21. Now we just need to duplicate the selected bones (
Armature
→ Duplicate
), press
Escape
, and then use the Mirror tool with the X Global opion (
Armature → Mirror
→ X Global
, and then press
Enter
). This way, we get both the arm and the leg for
the right side of our character.
22. There is a final tweak to be done, though. With the duplicated bones selected,
let's go to
Armature → Flip Names
. This last operaion will set the names of the
duplicated bones appropriately for their side (
.L
for the left,
.R
for the right).
And that's it for the creaion of the armature, let's save our ile and coninue working on the
next task.
Objective Complete - Mini Debriefing
In this task, we just added a very simple armature for our character. We started with the
basic bone for a default armature and then duplicated it to create the chain of bones for
the spine-head. For the leg and arm, we used a very nice tool for sketching bones called
Skeleton
Sketching
. For this tool to work properly for us, we had to set some snap opions
(Volume snap) and use the
Ctrl
key while clicking to sketch (the
Ctrl
key acivates the
snapping; the snapping mode was not enabled as such).
We also prepared a bone that will be used to create a rig mechanism later (
footIK.L
) and
detached it from the chain that we extruded it from.
For the sake of keeping our project organized, we renamed each bone, giving meaningful
names and using the
.L
suffix (as a hint for Blender to be able to assist us later when using
some tools).
Finally, we mirrored the bones on the left-hand side of our character to create the ones on
the right-hand side and used a very useful command to get the naming of the new bones
correct. This way, each
.L
bone has a matching
.R
bone.
Armature Setup
Our armature is now ready to be set up using some coniguraion opions that will make it
a lot more useable later, when animaing it. The setup process is needed not only to reduce
the complexity of using the armature for animaion, but also to create very sophisicated
"puppet-like" systems that can help the animator a lot. For this project, we'll only use a
couple of basic opions for the armature setup—parening and IK constraint.
