[ Rig and Pose A Mannequin ]
(http://s1.postimg.org/x5p3j4sq7/image.png)
The next stage in a mannequin's evolution
Welcome to the second Skertch. A Skertch is a mini challenge. A mini challenge involves tasks that are fairly simple, easy to do for individuals. However, these Skertches can lead to more than just a simple trivial practice in CG. Keep that in mind!
Skertch #2 -- [ Rig and Pose A Mannequin ]
Rig and pose a 3D Mannequin. A Mannequin, in animation, is a body whose parts are separated at their joints and animated without mesh deformations. That is to say, they aren't skinned (in Anim8or terms), and instead the individual parts are assigned to the individual bones in the underlying rig. The purpose is to focus on form and gesture through actions in animation, enabling the user to strengthen their foundations and conceptualize ideas.
In the previous Skertch, the objective was to model a mannequin. As you might have guessed already, the next step is to rig it. You may use any of the posted mannequins in the previous Skertch (http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php/topic,5169.0.html). If you want to use your own that you made in the previous Skertch, you may do so.
Requirements
- Rig the model in the Figure Editor
- You may use either skinning or individual bone assignments (see Notes below)
- Pose (do not animate!) the figure in the Sequence Editor or Scene Editor, and then render the single frame in the Scene Editor using a simple but nice scene setup with lighting, shadows, and antialiasing. You may use simple primitives (cubes, spheres, cones, cylinders, pyramids) if you want to pose it interacting with objects. Do not make detailed scene props.
- Post the .an8 file and the rendered image as attachments in this topic
Notes
You may either skin the mannequin or assign each part of the mannequin to its corresponding bone. Methods to do so are described here. Refer to the manual or forum and/or experiment if you do not know how to perform some of these actions.
Skinning: Even if you go the Skinning route, you are not allowed to have any vertices influenced by more than one bone. That is to say, a single component of the mannequin must be influenced entirely by a single bone and no other bones. Note that a bone may have more than one mannequin component, if it makes sense to do so. To perform this kind of skinning,
- Add the object with all of the mannequin's components to a bone in the figure.
- Create a full skeleton for the mannequin, with each bone being placed at its corresponding mannequin component. Create this skeleton with animation in mind--what's the best way to rig it so that it can handle any animation requirement? You may need to have supplementary bones to aid in various motions later.
- You may set bone rotation limits, though I recommend having no limits
- Click on the Multi-bone Skin tool <S> and click on the object.
- Hit No (Painted Weights) in the resulting popup dialog.
- Go to Build->Weight Brush... and input a weight of 1
- Right-click on a bone to activate it in order to paint its influences
- Left-click and drag over the vertices of the mannequin part that corresponds to that bone until those vertices are painted 100% the same color of the activated bone.
- Repeat steps 7 & 8 for each mannequin part, making sure that each mannequin part is influenced by only one bone.
- It may be useful to hide parts in the object editor while painting other parts in the Figure editor, so that you can avoid inadvertently painting parts you don't want to paint
Individual Bone Assigments: This is a more straightforward approach that is applicable for imitating real-life mannequins. but is more tedious and not effective for organic characters. To do this,
- Make a new object for each mannequin part
- In the original mannequin object, copy each part to its corresponding object (I recommend keeping the original mannequin intact)
- In the figure editor, make a bone and add the original mannequin object to it.
- Create a full skeleton for the mannequin, with each bone being placed at its corresponding mannequin component. Create this skeleton with animation in mind--what's the best way to rig it so that it can handle any animation requirement? You may need to have supplementary bones to aid in various motions later.
- You may set bone rotation limits, though I recommend having no limits
- Now select each individual bone and add its corresponding object to it, positioning and rotating it until it overlaps the original's precisely
- When finished, remove the original mannequin object from the figure
Add the Figure to a Scene. If you want its pose to interact with other basic primitives, it'll probably be easier to pose it directly within the Scene Editor. Otherwise you can pose it in the Sequence Editor and then add the Sequence to the Figure within the Scene Editor.
Next add any primitives, lights with shadow parameters, and enable antialiasing. Render the image.
Post the image and attach the .an8 file and any associated files in the same post. You're finished with this stage! Do a good job rigging, there are at least 3 more challenges that'll use this rig in the future!