Finishing the Armature

Now that the bones in the spine, arms and legs are ready, its time to get them ready to attach to the mesh for animating. To help prevent the mesh from deforming around the underarm area, I placed several placeholder bones. The collar bone was duplicated, and placed slightly below the original so that the right side came in contact with the underarm. A copy rotation constraint was placed so that it would rotate with the collar bone. A slightly smaller bone was extruded off this placeholder bone which runs parrarel to the mesh.











Now that all the bones had been made (I didn't need to make any facial bones since I was not interested in doing any facial animations), the arm and leg bones were duplicated, and mirrored (with the centre point set to 0,0,0) to form the bones of the right arm and leg.

Since I had named the arm and leg bones with the .L suffix, these names need to be changed for the right arm and leg. An easy way of doing this is bringing up the specials menu and choosing 'Flip Left-Right Names', which changes all of the selected suffixes to .R.