Module 2 - Modelling and Animation

Module 2

For this part of the module I learnt about rigging and basic character modeling. Rigging allows me to create animations using the models I make. To test this I made a simple cube person. I'm not exactly a skilled artist so a simple person is easy to work with. Plus given some of the errors I encountered a simple character was probably better to do in hindsight.

I made this guy out of cubes:

I added in what blender calls an 'armature' which is basically like a character's bones. These can be used to put the character in various poses which makes the animation process much smoother. Below is a view of the bones inside the cube man. There are a few for the spine to let him bend and two in each limb so that they can bend somewhat realistically at the joints.

You can see the bones inside the model:

A weird issue I got when making the bones work with the person was that the bones were connected to strange parts of the body. In the image below you can see when I rotated the shoulder his back became distorted, getting pulled with the right arm. IT was fairly easy to fix because cubes have so little points but I feel like on a more complicated model things could get rough.

Model issues:

Animating

I've done some animating before though that was many years ago so I was looking forwards to seeing how unity blender handles it. At the moment of writing this I hate it. I found it to be unwieldy at times. It handles the actual animation part well but actually implementing it was annoying. It feels like I need to keep manually updating each change I make to the animation rather than it automatically updating my changes like other programs I've used in the past. There might be  away to do this and I will try to find out if I can.

Here are the animations I made (though they're a bit stiff):

Idle

Waving

Walking