Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
the model is rigged to the bones. This is a delicate operation which can take a lot of
time, depending on the importance of that model in the economy of your game and
its complexity. Rigging a model means to define which points on the surface of the
3D model follow the movement of each specific bone and the strength of their con-
nection. If a model is not correctly rigged, once you animate it you will see the mesh
messing up badly!
For animating humanoid characters, special tools are available, for example, 3D Stu-
dio Max has a tool called biped.
The biped is basically a humanoid skeleton made of a given number of bones and
their connections. It saves the time needed to create a humanoid skeleton from
scratch and allows the user to define both the number of bones and their size.
The following figure represents the 3D Studio Max biped in a typical karate position:
The number of bones is important to define what kind of animations can be created
for the character: the number of fingers in the hands, for example, the number of
segments for the spine, or the bones to animate a tail, should the character have
one.
Scaling the size of the bones, on the other hand, is important to fit the size of the
mesh in order to better rig the mesh to its biped.
