Today I finished animating my character for this week's iLab assignment. This was probably the biggest pain out of all of the modeling steps we have covered so far. I initially had a different character modeled, but giving him bones turned out to be too difficult due to the size of his hips and legs, so I made a new one and shrank down the final model before attempting to give it a CAT system. The new character was much easier to put bones into, which I suspect is a side effect of me scaling him down after the modeling portion was completed. This is what the model looked like after some initial messing around with the bone structure:
I know his texture is quite creepy, but it was a quick and dirty texture that allowed me to test the skinning portion of the animation process. This is what his inner bone structure looks like:
He is made up of a pelvis, 2 legs, 2 arms and 2 spines. The second spine, which you can see above the first one, is used to animate the neck and head regions. It is the only way to do so, which I find weird. I wish there was a head option, or something like it, which would add in a neck and head box on top of the spine. This would make it easier as you would not have to determine how many bones the spine needs to have.
The next sequence of images shows one of his animations cycles. It is a kicking animation. Please excuse the extreme warping of his skin, as I did not take the time to paint weights onto the bones. Painting weights onto the bones would allow me to control which areas of the skin each bones can act upon.
I also made a clapping and punching animation. I still cannot figure out why his right hand (our left) ended up in such a weird position from the start. Never could fix it properly either. I assume it is from having an issue with the weighting system, which I would have to go in and manually fix. It is a gigantic pain, so I will save that for a later date and later models. This was just a quick and dirty set of animations.
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