Rigging The Spine and Arm

The best place to start rigging a human model is traditionally the base of the spine. When placing the 'bones, is it important to have both the front and side views open to make sure that the bones are being placed inside the mesh of the human. Creating the rigging in a seperate layer also makes it easier to change from mesh to rig, as well as distinguishinig between mesh and bone.

The spine was made by placing a hip bone, and then extruding a second bone all the way up to the neck. This second bone was then subdivided to form 4 bones which make up the spine. The top spine bone was then extuded upwards to form a neck bone, and again to form a head 'bone'.










The arm bones were then placed, made up of a collar, upper arm, lower arm and wrist bone extending into the base of the finger tips. To add movability to the fingers, a bone was added to the ring finger, and then subdivided to form 3 finger bones. The finger bones were then duplicated and placed in the middle finger, and resized to scale. Before duplicating for the rest of the fingers, copy rotation constraints were placed in the newly duplicated bones to mimic the rotation of the ring finger bones. The middle figner bones were then duplicated and placed in the index, and pinky fingers before being resized.










I used the same method to create the bones in the thumb. Two more bones were then added, one in the thumb and one in the ring finger. Now that was done, several IK bones were created, which would be used to control the movement of the bones without having to individually alter each one. An IK bone was added to the end of several bones in the arm and fingers, followed by an IK constraint to the connecting bone which allowed realistic looking arm movement by grabbing and pulling on the IK bones. Several bones were parented before I was left with the final product.










Although it requires a lot of time and patience, I didn't really run into any major problems with the rigging since I kept referring to the tutorial on what to do. The next stage is to rig the leg bones.

Rigging the Model

The next stage was to add bones to the model so that the model behaves anatomically as a human in real life would, so that the model can be animated and provide realistic looking fluid motions. This is a process called rigging.

To find out how to rig the model I had previously imported, I once again looked on the internet to find a good tutorial on how this could be done. Most of the tutorials I discovered had the rigging procedure for each stage of the body, but written individually by different authors, which may cause problems with trying to implement all parts into the same structure.

It was then that I discovered a set of tutorials that had beed posted on youtube.com by the user ArtER21. The nice thing about these tutorials is that he also used the MakeHuman programme to implement a 3D model of a human into blender, allowing me to be more familiar with the process.

Using MakeHuman

After downloading MakeHuman, I started experimenting with all of the options that are available. Features such as height, weight and build can be adjusted on a slider to the user's liking. If any specific parts of the body need adjusting individually, they can be selected and altered with the click of a button.















Since the human I am designing is an athlete, I put up the level of muscle faily high and also made him slightly taller and weigh more to give the effect of a person who trains a lot. I also chose not to add any hair or any ethnicity to the model as these will not be needed once I import the model into blender, since I will that this would detract the attention away from the actual animation of the scenes.













Once I was happy with the look of my model, I first saved a copy as a MakeHuman file (incase I would want to make any changes to the model later) and then exported the model as a lightwave file. I then opened blender and imported the lightwave file into the scene and set up some lighting, no problems what so ever. The model was finished off by applying a smooth modifier to round off all of the edges. The final outcome can be seen below.

Make Human

Whilst looking around on the internet for various tutorials on how to make humans in blender, I came across aopen source programme called MakeHuman. MakeHuman is a powerful tool that allows the user to create 3-Dimensal Humanoid models which can then be customised to the user's liking.

The nice thing about this programme is that once the human is looking as you want it, the file can be saved and imported directly into blender as a lightwave object (.obj). Doing this will allow me to spend more time on the animations of the models rather than having to construct them from scratch.