Animation Tutorials - Bones

Adding Bones to an object, most commonly character models allows body parts to be moved freely and realisticaly with the other parts of the body. It is extremely useful and time saving when it comes to animating characters.
For this tutorial we used the provided character model torso and added bones to the model manually in order to animate the arms.

Provided Model

 

The bones are added using a heriachy so that each new bone created is affect by the last, just like a real skeleton. This means moving the Bicep will make the Forcep move too. 

Bicep - Forcep and Hand

For this instand I modelled the whole hand as one bone for simplicity but for models which require finger movement bones for each finger would also be needed. 

After linking the bones to the torso polygons the area in which it affects more than often needs fine tuning so that all of the polygons move when required and they do not affect areas they are not supposed to. This is a long process but is very benificial to the animation quality.

Rendered Tosro after moving the arms using the bones.