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



THE TUTORIAL: Part Three


And so PART 3 of this Tutorial is upon us. So far we have built 6 different Skeletons. RS3D calls each bone and joint object a Skeleton. For example the two bones and three joints called Skel_shoulder_left in the picture to the right, is ONE SKELETON. The bones and joints that make up skel_head is another and so on.

Our next step is to add hierarchy to our seperate skeletons for later animation of the whole. To do this we will be dragging one skeleton INTO another in a certain order. Then we will attach the lower level skeletons to the higher level skeletons. Confused? Well onto the next panel below .. all will be revealed!


The top most Skeleton in our Hierarchy will be the SPINE. Multi select [ left click one, then hold down shift and multi select the others ] the Head, Shoulder and Hip Skeletons and drag them onto the Spine Skeleton. The cursor icon should change to a double arrow pointing towards each other, now let go. Something like the picture to the left will have happened [ ignore the arm and leg for the moment ].

Once the Head, Shoulder and Hip Skeletons are 'inside' the Spine Skeleton we finish by grabbing the Arm Skeleton and dragging this onto the Shoulder Skeleton, leave go. Now do the same with the Leg Skeleton, drag it onto the Hip Skeleton. Make sure you have the Hierarchy the same as the picture to the left.

Note that our Hierarchy has three indented levels [ parent and child ]. Level one is the Spine, Level two is the Head, Shoulder and Hip, Level three is the Arm and Leg. Inside the Spine we have also gone from top down - Head, Shoulder, Arm, Hip, Leg. This is important and logical for later animation of our character.




Now we will JOIN all the 'Sub-Skeletons' together into one big Skeleton. Again we do this in a Hierarchical manner. Select the Head, Shoulder and Hip Skeletons. Look up at the menu bar, you should see a button called ATTACH - left click it. This will attach these three Skeletons to the Spine. [ See the first picture below ]

Next, select the Arm and leg Skeletons, again, left click the ATTACH button. This will attach the Arm to the Shoulder and the Leg to the Hip. [ See the second picture below ]









TIP TIME: The MESH LEVEL - fast_man object in the pictures above is my simple character figure. It is currently hidden on the workspace. To do so, just left click [ in my case ] MESH LEVEL and click on the button WF-Inv in the tool bar. This will make the selected item invisible in realtime editing. It will still render. If one does not want an object to Render then left click it and select the RT-Inv button. Both these buttons are toggle buttons - on / off. The Name of the object will become italicized as below.



Here is an important bit of information at this stage:

If you look at the picture below you will see that the SHOULDER SKELETON is a bit back from the SPINE SKELETON. We are looking at the Hierarchy from behind. Now for the sake of this tutorial lets pretend we noticed this anomally AFTER ATTACHING the various skeletons to each other. A function is at hand that will avoid having to UNATTACH the Skeletons. Have a look at the PROPERTY PANEL in the picture. To get this panel up I double clicked the Shoulder Skeleton in the Hierarchy. I then clicked the SPEC tab, followed by the SKELETON tab further down the panel and finally dropped the DEFAULT JOINT ACTION menu. Here I set the default to MOVE JOINTS instead of INVERSE KINEMATICS. Now go into the EDIT MODE of the SHOULDER SKELETON in the WORKSPACE, select the RED DOT Joint closest to the spine and move it as desired. See the Second picture below for the result. Once you have finished moving Joints reset DEFAULT JOINT ACTION back to INVERSE KINEMATICS.




click here for top of page


PART FOUR of this tutorial >>