Self Study 2 - Bones, Rigging, and Animation

For this week's Self-Study, we were tasked with making our own humanoid model, which we then rigged and animated.

For the model, I just made a simple humanoid object and used the subdivide surface modifier to make it look a bit more rounded.

I then started working on the rigging process and tried to do the Inverse Kinematics myself. However, I realised it was taking far too long, as rigging is not something I have much experience with, so I just used Blender's in-built rig-generating feature. Once that had been set up, it was a lot easier to make all of the animations.

The Waving animation was the first one that I worked on. I first just had the one arm waving but to make it feel a bit more fluid I made the body move slightly with the wave.

The walking animation took a bit longer as there are more parts that are moving at the same time. I looked up a 2D walk cycle to help me figure out where the key frames need to be. I started with the feet, worked my way up the body. I realised here that one of the arms rigging was a bit messed up as the elbow was bending the wrong way, so it took a bit to get it to look decent.