Week 6-Adding Bones to the Robot

So far I have created the model of the robot, but as yet I am unable to animate it. The main part of animation I have planned is on the robot and so I am now going to add bones to the character. To create the bones I selected the IK limb solver. I then drew out the leg bone consisting of 6 bones: a hip, thigh, shin, ankle, foot and toe bone. Once drawn I then repositioned the bones in a way which a human bone would naturally be, for example the hip and ankle bone at the back and knee joint at the front.

Before I went on I gave each of the bones a sensible name.

When I was happy with the proportion of the bones in relation to the leg, I cloned an instance of the bones. However, this was a mistake as when I moved one bone it moved both legs. Therefore I deleted the clone and repeated this process, but this time I made it a copy. Afterwards I positioned the bones in both legs.

The next step was to apply the skin modifier to the legs. I selected all the bones in that leg from the window to add to the skin modifier. I then repeated this process for the other leg.

Afterwards I went on to create the arm bones. Again I used the IK limb solver and tried to draw out 6 bones proportional to the models arm, these bones being the shoulder, top of arm, bottom of arm, wrist, hand and fingers. When I was happy with the sizing in comparison to the modelled arm I cloned a copy of the bones, aligned the clone with the other arm and then named all the bones.

Next I applied a skin modifier to each of the modelled arms and attached all the bones to it which were needed to control its movement. All the bones were now created so I went on to edit the envelopes.

On each envelope I dragged the points until the area which I wanted the bone to affect was completely orange, therefore keeping the area smooth whilst animating.

When I had edited the envelope for each bone on each limb I tried positioning the arm and rendered the result.

I was really disappointed with this outcome as I had worked hard on creating the bones. However, changes needed to be made to get the sections of the arm more rigid and only to bend in appropriate places. Therefore I went back and re-edited the envelopes.

This time I made sure that the envelope only covered the section of the arm where the bone was and they did not overspill into any other area. Also I kept the envelope colours warm in shades of orange or alternatively as close as possible.

This attempt had been much more successful and so I went on to repeat the process on the other arm. Afterwards I re-edited the envelopes on the legs.

Once again I made sure only the area of the bone was affected. This was slightly more challenging for the leg due to the sloping position of the bone and as a result took longer to achieve, however once complete and trialled this worked well.

The robot is now complete. The final thing I need to build is the teddy bear and so I will do this next.