Rigging and Skinning - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 151

NOTE
Lattices use a separate coordinate system: U, V, and W. The [uvw] system comes from the roots
of lattice mathematics. There is little to no practical distinction to the artist, though.

An Armature modifi er was added to the lattice itself so that
the bone movements of the toy would affect it along with the
main body. Creating vertex groups on a lattice is less conve-
nient than creating them on a mesh object, which is one other
reason to keep the resolution count of the lattice as low as pos-
sible. To create vertex groups for armature-based animation of
a lattice, it is necessary to enter Edit mode on the lattice, select
the lattice vertices you wish to move, and manually create and
assign them to a vertex group in the Links and Materials
panel of the Edit buttons . Figure 9.42 shows a vertex group
created for the head bone.

Figure 9.41 The Lattice panel, showing the simple

settings for the toy's mouth lattice

In this example, the top and middle portion of the lattice
move along with the bones for the top of the head, while the bottom and middle are bound via vertex group
to the neck bone. The fi nal effect, shown in Figure 9.43, is that the stitching is deformed smoothly as the lat-
tice deforms, producing a nicer effect than simple vertex group/armature deformation.

Figure 9.42 A lattice vertex group that will move

with the “head” bone

Figure 9.43 The Beast's toy severely deformed, with the lattice

keeping the stitching in place