Rigging

For the rigging task we were supplied with a model and the task was to rig the model and animate a walk cycle.

The reason that rigging is good is to give the model an armature made of bone objects that can be manipulated easily. In a rigged model you could control an arm or a leg by manipulating one bone, which would affect the bone and the bone its joined to. I changed the menu category to be the rigging option so I would get the options for rigging. I clicked Skeleton and then create joints. This created a bone and when I clicked it would extrude another bone from it so they would all be group into one armature group.

I then joined the bones to the mesh so that when I would manipulate the bones, it will move the mesh with it. I then took key frames of the positions of the bones and then moved along the timeline 25 frames and rotated the bones and then took another key frame. So that Maya would interpolate the rotation between the two key frames. I then spaced the key frames closer together so that the model would start running because the key frames were closer so the interpolation needed to work quicker. I used a spline tangent to interpolate between the key frames because I felt that the spline tangent gives a more realistic type of movement for the human body. I didn't move the arms because the mesh got deformed when I manipulated the arms. I think this may be because my model's "shoulders" were too big or too close to the edge of the mesh.

 

References

• Software used: Autodesk Maya

• Model downloaded from Blackboard.

Project Folder

Rigging Project Folder