Week8. Bones animation

This time we had to use bones to animated the torso. First the torso was made see-trough in its object properties window. Then the bones were created using the create->systems->bones panel.
The bones were placed along the arm bending points. The arm ended up with four bones including the small "guide" bone at the end. The bone system was moved to match the torso model. Another hand bone system was a copy of the previous one with some adjusted bones. The bones were rotated along the connection points. Then each bone was given a name. Each bone was edited in modifier panel by increasing size of side, back abd front fins so they would touch torso mesh on each side.

To make arm parts bend more natural "IK limb solver" was applied to the bones trough animation->IK solvers->IK limb solvers. Next the torso was "skinned". The torso object was applied with skin modifier. All bones were added to the "bones" box. Extra bone was created in the middle of the body to avoid unwanted stretching by the arms. It was modified and added to the torso bone system same as previous bones. To make bones movement even more natural the envelope of each bone was modified trough skin modifier envelopes sub-selection. The envelopes rings radius were changed to adjust how much mesh each bone affects. Finally, animation was creating by moving bones in different frames with autokey on.

King Kong and clapping animation: