Self Study 2 - Bone Hurting

Alright, so for this week we're supposed to add an animated character to our scene... lets make a sphere that can be deformed to make the body...

I may or may not have got distracted making a snowman. Alright so what were the requirements again?

• Upper Arm
• Lower Arm
• Hand
• Upper Leg
• Lower Leg
• Foot
• Spine (x3)
• Head

Hmmm a snowman doesn't normally have those but we can make this work... probably

I tried to be clever and use the mirror tool so I wouldn't have to duplicate the limbs, unfortunately it didn't work because the mirror tool doesn't duplicate the actual mesh, I had to manually create both sides.

(hand mesh acquired from Blendswap)

It's perfect, I can't imagine anyone possibly objecting to this model on any grounds.

Now time to animate it, rig up some bones (we'll add a few extras because what could be wrong with double jointed knees?), parent them properly, and then time for some keyframes.

Waving is fine:

And, as you can see, the walk cycle is normal:

You can really see the bones in the legs trying to escape the confines of the body they were placed in, I had to make sure not to bend any parts too much or the distortion gets really bad.

And that's it really, a perfectly normal character with an elegant walk!

19 bones were harmed in the making of this post.