REALSOFT 3D - SKELETONS, BONES & JOINTS TUTORIAL - PAGE 2

THE TUTORIAL: Part Two

Welcome to PART 2 of this little Tutorial. Here we will be adding the Hip & Shoulder Skeletons. Fill out our overall chain of Skeletons. These will be useful later when we are getting into movement and joint constraining. So on we go .. To the right we have a zoomed in picture of the base of the Spine and the top of the left leg. What we want here is a HIP SKELETON between the two. Have a look at the two screen shot pictures immediately below. What I have done is to set the work area to the front view first. Select the Tools Menu / Construction / Create Skeleton. Left Click the first joint at the base of the spine, now drag downwards a little, left click again for a second joint. Next drag to the right and above the top of the leg Skeleton, left click again. Finally drag slightly down to the top of OR to the first joint of the Leg Skeleton, left click once more, now right click and ACCEPT. As before you may need to move the new Hip Skeleton into position. You should then end up with something similar to below. REMEMBER - as in the pictures below, the joints are the RED DOTS, connecting the bones in YELLOW. To get this effect for your new hip skeleton as below [ as in the colours ] , just select the Skeleton and click on the EDIT button just under the FILE MENU button, top left.

Time to give our character a SHOULDER Skeleton. This process is similar to the HIP SKELETON above. Have a good look at the two pictures immediately below. For the SHOULDER we are going to use just two bones [ 3 joints ]. Select the Tools Menu / Construction / Create Skeleton. Left Click once at the spine [ as in the picture below, right ], drag to the right, left click again for a new joint, drag right and slightly down to meet the first joint at the top of the arm. Once here, left click again. Finally right click and ACCEPT. Now navigate around workspace and move the new Shoulder Skeleton into position as in the pictures below.

SOMETHING TO WATCH OUT FOR #1: Before I moved the finished Shoulder Skeleton into position, I noticed it was slightly tilted in rotation. This is sort of visible in the picture below. This was simple to resolve. I selected the Shoulder Skeleton object in the SELECT WINDOW [ this window is hard left in the default environment ], right clicked on it to get the drop down menu. Then picked PROPERTIES. Under the GEN tab of properties scroll down to OBJECT SPACE. Have a look now at the picture below. In my case the rotation parameters were set to -180.00 -0.00 -167.17. In this case I simply set the -167.17 to -180 and all was well. Sticking to the usual angles to straighten objects [ + / - 0, 30, 90, 180, 360 ] is probably best here in all rotation parameters to suit your needs. Well thats my humble opinion anyway ... Once this little tweak is finished I slotted the shoulder skeleton into position. GO BACK THROUGH ALL YOUR PREVIOUS SKELETONS, IF YOU WISH, AND FIX ROTATIONS IN THIS WAY, IF NEEDED...

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PART THREE of this tutorial >>