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Chapter List
Page Two
Spine Placement
Page Three
Neck and Head
Page Four
Attaching Neck/Spine
Page Five
Begin Orient Constraints
Page Six
Orients Continued
Page Seven
Pelvis, Leg, and Foot
Page Eight
Clavicle, Arm, and Hand
Page Nine
Arm, and Hand continued
Page Ten
Keeping Things Organized
Page Eleven
Character Skinning, Part One
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Getting to the teeth first. I simply skin, with a rigid bind, the lower
teeth to the Jaw and the upper teeth to the Head. It's fairly simple as far as
setup goes, but it proves to be very effective. I have to remind you not
to parent anything to your skeleton. Use only skinning and constraints, that way,
you never have to go looking for your model pieces anywhere other than the
group that you originally put them into.
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Now I am using the Component Editor for some fast tuning of the skin
to the skeleton. Here I simply selected all of the vertices on the
lower part of the head I want to be driven by the jaw rotation.
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Then I go into the Component Editor and set them all at 1.000 on
on the jawJA_1 bone. This locks thme into an easy to remember place.
For an wasy tip, you can now hold donw the Shift button and select all
of the vertices on the head now. This should 'de-select' all of your
jaw vertices, and select the remaining ones in the head area.
You can fine tune your selecting a number of ways to get what you need.
Some of these are using the Ctrl key to deselect unwanted vertices, or
the Paintbrush selection tool is very useful as well.
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With this all set the way you want it, you can check the rotation
of your jaw roughly and see if any unwanted verts are being moved.
I like this picture, it reminds me of Pink Floyd's The Wall, a little.
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Moving on to the eyes, you can see that I placed a couple of extra joints
into the head. I put them in seperately, and then parented them to the
skeleton. These are place holders for the eyes. You don't skin the eyes
to these two end bones, instead I use a Point Constraint, and a Scale
Constraint. I want them to rotate indepently from the skeleton, but to stay
where they are.
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You can see why I use a Scale constraint on the eyes. If, for any reason,
you need to scale your charater up or down and you don't use the Scale
Constraint, your eyes will stay where they belong but they will be the
wrong size.
You can see here, that I scaled my character way down. (To about 1/10
of it's original size. The eyes were properly scaled along with the
joints they were constrained to.
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And to the feet, they were skinned to the last bone on the leg, as
well as all the bones in the feet. I will fine tune the feet as I go
along into the tutorial. For now they work like feet. But there are no
special setups as of yet.
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Here I set up a simple Ramp Shader wtih a few colors to divide them apart,
and to simulate the eye colors. I'll move on to animating and eye setup
at a later date.
Next, I'll get into using the Component Editor for easily setting weights to
vertices. This gets very time consuming, but if you have a low poly character,
and you use it to drive a higher resolution character it is still a very effective
way to work.
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