REALSOFT 3D - SKELETONS, BONES & JOINTS TUTORIAL - PAGE 1



DOWNLOAD THE BASIC FAST MAN CHARACTER MESH USED IN THIS TUTORIAL

< CLICK HERE >

[ PLEASE NOTE: this is a Zipped REALSOFT File created in RS3D ver. 4.5 SP1.
To download it, RIGHT CLICK the Link above & select SAVE TARGET AS ... 176KB ]



JUST A FEW NOTES BEFORE I BEGIN:

THIS IS NOT A DEFINITIVE TUTORIAL ON RIGGING A CHARACTER. ITS BASED ON MY OWN DISCOVERIES WHILE LEARNING. IN THE FUTURE AND DEPENDING ON FEEDBACK AND FURTHER EXPERIMENTATION, THE DETAIL MAY CHANGE.


If you spot any anomalies and / or have any additions / suggestions please tell me. This will allow me to fine tune this tutorial. Email any such feedback to: realsoft@tidalsound.com

I will be using the default environment layout through out this tutorial. All the pictures are based on this.

Things like the shape of the character mesh, arm sizes, bone lengths and so on - I did not care too much about. If you are that particular, be so on your own time. I went about this bit of learning to do exactly that, not to get bogged down too much in side issues - enough time for that later.

Remember what I said I am still learning, so by venting with this tutorial helps me to consolidate this learning and also maybe finetune same with your help and input!



PEOPLE WHO SUGGESTED / ADDED:

Thanks ARJO for the idea of putting the basic Character Mesh online.



THE TUTORIAL: Part One


I created a basic low poly model of a character starting from an SDS cube. I pulled and dragged and ended up with this chap to the right. Not perfect, but sufficient for my learning needs.

Now what you see here has been slightly refined. For example the arms [ not including hands ] were originally a long rectangle extuded from the side of the torso. I divided this rectangle into even smaller faces with the knife tool. Equally one could extrude out 9 or 10 times in small moves to achieve the same effect. I did the same with the legs and to an extent with the torso and head. Reason for this post division malarkey, well later when you are attaching the Skeleton to this mesh, you may want a denser mesh to facilitate smoother arm bends, knee bends etc.



TIP TIME: A Skeleton is made up of Bones and Joints. The Bones are the 'Diamond' Shaped objects attached to each other by Joints. To see this - After you create two or more bones [ a Skeleton ], click on the EDIT BUTTON [ usually top left, under the File Menu ] OR Right Click the Skeleton and select EDIT. In this mode, the default colour for Bones is Yellow and for joints is RED DOTS.



Now lets go straight into the Skeleton construction. Select the Tools Menu / Construction / Create Skeleton. Go to the Front or Top view in your work area and add 4 bones as pictured left. Here I added an upper arm bone, an elbow bone, a wrist bone and a knuckle bone. To finish adding bones beyond the knuckle RIGHT CLICK the mouse & select ACCEPT. Once accepted move the views from top to side to front and drag this Skeleton inside the left arm as you see here [ Its his left Arm, Hokay! ]




Lets give this guy some Spine. Here I went to a side view in the workspace. Select the Tools Menu / Construction / Create Skeleton. Now start with the 'Tail' bone, which, as you can see is horizontal [ character wise - from his Back to his Front], then add two more bones up through the torso, stop at around the neck. Again, once ACCEPTED, you may need to drag / position the whole Spine Skeleton inside our character as is the case in the picture to the right.

Here I borrowed some wisdom from the MR SOCK TAKES A WALK Tutorial by Thomas Dow. Thomas'es advice is that the Spine should have a minimum of three bones [ not including the tail ]. This "in order to give the spine a naturalistic compression when it is animated". Here I kept it simple - up to you to experiment with the number of bones. I wanted a basic Skeleton to begin with - walk before you run so to speak!




Select the Tools Menu / Construction / Create Skeleton. Go to the Front or Side view in your work area and add 1 bone positioned in the head as pictured left. I started this bone at the neck and dragged up during creation - then ACCEPT. Using the navigation in the workspace to see where the bone was relative to the mesh, I moved the Head Bone inside the Characters Head and positioned it at the top of the Spine Bone.




Next the Leg. Here, again, I went to a side view in the workspace. Select the Tools Menu / Construction / Create Skeleton. I started at the top of the leg for bone number 1, then another bone I started at the knee to the ankle, then from the ankle to the toes and then the toe bone.

Once accepted - yes you guessed, navigate around and move the leg Skeleton inside our chracters leg mesh.




BELOW FIND TWO IMAGES OF THE LEFT HALF SKELETON WITHOUT BODY MESH AND WITH.








click here for top of page



PART TWO of this tutorial >>