Character Body Design part3.

With a model for the character created I could now begin animating the biped for my first scene.

Before the biped can be animated however, the mesh must first be attached to the bones. This requires the use of the 'skin' modifier to attach mesh and bone and begin animating. However, for unknown reasons, the skin modifier would not attach the bones to the mesh and consequently, the mesh would not be affected by movement of the biped!

Due to this, I have been forced to use an alternative method and turn to the 'Physique' modifier which is also used to perform the same task. the major difference between the skin and Physique modifiers is the fact that the later focuses more of envelope 'weight-editing' as opposed to vertex weighting, which is ultimately more precise.



The Physique tool works by creating a circuit of 'veins' throughout the biped which can be edited to perfect it's weighting affect on the surrounding model surfaces. Each section features a selectable envelope which is used to adjust the weight settings and area coverage. The trick with this, is getting the correct shape from the envelope, otherwise too much or not enough surfaces are affected correctly to prevent mesh-tearing..



So far I have been unable to produce a clean flow of motion using the current model design, this is down to the model being too bulky, which also has caused issues with setting the Physique envelopes correctly to prevent this.