We next went about creating a character and rigging it for animation purposes. I created a head and torso out of simple squares, and made sure to keep these all grouped in a parent structure in which affecting one would affect all others in said group, also making sure to change pivot points as to where it would make sense for a body part to rotate from.
The arms follow a hierarchy in when the parents moves, the children must move along with them, an example being if the arm moves then the forearm, hand and fingers must move with them.
Next i went about building some legs for the character. After which was the much harder portion of using bones to make a leg structure to build a way for the legs to move as opposed to a parenting structure used on the arms.
These joints had a similar parent child hierarchy to before, and were paired with
I also mirrored the joints to make a secondary leg and simply set on to Hips L instead of Hips R. I then created a hip joint and constrained both legs to the hip joint. This would make the hierarchy have it where the pivot points from the bones would all work downwards.
I started creating some IK Handles, in which moving one joint to another would move the joints in between, for example moving the ankle joint would then move the knee joint inbetween the ankle and hip joints.
I then made a simple circle spline and used this as a hip controller, parent constraining it to the hips so that i could use a spline to then control the IK Chain instead of grabbing individual pivots and moving those. While both work, samply grabbing larger splines would be easier.
After our professor, Nick had taught us these concepts he gave us a fully rigged model with all the handles and parenting completed for us to use in works of animation. I Went about using the same techinques learned in the previous lesson and also the techniques used in the physics animation of easing keyframes to create a smoother, realistic animation in which i could have the character properly pick up a ball, slowing down in certain parts and speeding up in others, specifically having him slow as he crouched and having him speed up on the height of him standing up. Making sure to always rotate the splines as joints would rotate and not move on a human being. I also tried to use a very slight movement in the right leg pivoting to make the movement of knees separating when the character bends down.
I had a decent animation, but it could still use some tweaking and wasnt actually picking up the ball at all.
I fixed this by making it so that when the character’s hand goes over the ball, between one frame it would toggle the ball and constrain it to the hand inbetween two keyframes being on and off
After this i had a much better animation going.
Then i added some simple textures and made a full render, adding a chrome texture to the sphere being picked up.