Javelin

Once the running gcycle had been made, I decided to make a start on the javelin throw animation. However, a bit of the way into position the starting pose, I noticed that the armature I was using did not allow the arm to rotate in such a fashion in order to grip the javelin properly. Instead of reconfiguring the armature to allow better grip, I decided to chose another olympic practice instead.










The first one I chose to do was olympic diving, as there is a wide variety of diffent techniques to animate. However, since I was unable to find any slow motion videos I could reference, as well as the high probability that there would be another conflict in the armature, I decided to look for another. In the end, I chose rowing since it has a good balance of arm, leg and back animation. The videos I used for reference are listed below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLhptMPeh7A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqVmMd7FdAA

Runner Part 2

Now that I had half of the cycle done, I was time to finish the second half to make a complete cycle. Luckily, there is an easy way of doing this. Instead of re-posing each of the positions as I've already done, I can just use these poses for the rest of the cycle. In the last update, I used the paste pose to get the mid-cycle pose, which I will use again to get the rest of the poses.












Since I did each step of the animation every 5 frames, I went back to the beginning and every 5 frames, copied and flip pasted the pose into the desired frame. After doing this to every frame. I had a complete run cycle. However, I wanted to make this run cycle last over 240 frames, instead of the 120 which was the current length of the cycle. To do this, I went into the action editor window after highlighting all of the bones and selected all of the keyframes. I then duplicated them and positioned them further in the timeline so that one cycle would begin straight after the last. I then did a test render on the animation too see how it looked.

The result was relatively good but there was still something missing. It was then that I noticed that although both the leg and arm movements had been animated, the body had remained completely still the whole way through.

I went back to the animation and set up some key frames in the spine bones, giving them a bit on rotation left and right as the legs and arms move back and forth. After rendering the animation again, I was happy with the result.

The Running Man

The first piece of animation will be a run cycle based on an olympic sprinter. To start off, I selected a starting pose for the animation. I decided to go with one with a foot in contact with the floor, and the leg as perpendicular to the floor as possible, since this pose would be easiest to replicate. To help get the pose right, I used a reference video which I posted earlier which would help me get the position, angle and rotation of the bones as close as possible.













Once the pose was good from one side, I flipped to the front row and lined it up into position again. From there on, everytime I forwarded the reference video 10 frames, I moved the animation 5 frames and redid the pose, remembering to add position and rotationg keyframes for each IK bone which I would move. When the runner had completed an exact half-cycle on the video, I simply selected the first frame, selected all the bones, and chose Copy Pose. I then went to the frame where the half-cycle pose was going to be and chose Paste Flipped Pose.

However, when I done this, the legs were completely fine but the arms were out of position. I did some research into what may be the cause for this problem, which was when I was suggested that the axis of the bones in each arm may be different from each other. Sure enough by showing the axis', they were different in each arm. To fix this, I managed to re-align the bone rolls in each arm (which I have already done once before, but not on both arms) which managed to solve the problem. This time when I flipped the pose, all was well.

Weight Painting

Now that the mesh has been attached to the armature, the first area I looked at was to see if there were any vertices in the mesh that have not been assigned to a vertex group (i.e. not linked to a bone). To do this, I simply grabbed the 'balance bone' in the centre of the mesh (in pose mode) and dragged it. Any vertices that would be attached to a bone should be dragged along with it, leaving any unassigned vertices behind.











Sure enough, some of the vertices were left behind. The main cause of unnasigned vertices was due to some of the mesh in the head, such as the eyes and teeth. In order to fix these vertices, I went into Weight Paint mode and selected the corresponding vertex group of which I wanted the desires vertices to be assigned to. By selected an intensity of 1.000 and 'painting' over the vertices, I managed to assign them to the bones and stop them from stretching out of position.

Attaching the Armature to the Mesh

Now that all the bones have been made, I needed to attach these bones to the mesh so that when the bones are moved, the mesh is moves also. To attach the armature, the bones first need to be parented to the mesh. When parenting the bones, there is the option to create vertex groups. I selected the option 'Create from Bone Heat' which basically tells the mesh to attach the mesh to a bone if it is in close proximity to that bone. This saves a lot of trouble of having to weight paint the entire model.










After creating the vertex groups, I decided to check the rigging to see how the mesh would respond when posing the armature. It was here that I noticed a problem with the rigging on the right hand of the armature. Instead of bending in sync with the ring finger, all of the fingers bend off in different directions, regardless of which way the original ring finger bent.

To solve this, I first tried unattaching and then reattaching all of the parents and constraints in the hand, but the problem still persisted. The next step I took was to check the names of the bones, incase there was a problem with the left-right names being flipped. Lastly, I decided to research this problem on the internet and see if there was a fix. In the end, it turns out there was a problem with something called the 'bone roll', which needed to be recalculated after the left armature had been mirrored. By re-aligning the z-axis with the cursor of the bone rolls, I fixed this problem.

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.

Rigging the Legs

Now that the arms were rigged, I moved onto the legs. Once again, I used the tutorials posted by ArtER21 on his youtube account as a guide to rig the legs. First, a bone was created in the top of the leg near the hip bone, and resized so that it runs down the leg to the feet (around the ankle). This bone was subdivided and the middle 'joint' placed where the knee should be. This should make up the leg bones.










For the bones in the feet, the lower leg bone was extruded to the base of the toes to form an upper foot bone, and again into the end of the middle toe to form a lower foot bone. Since I do not really mind if the toes bend or not, I do not need to place 2/3 bones in each toe. This lower foot bone can then be duplicated and resized for each toe to form the toe bones. Each of these toe bones need to be parented to the upper foot bone.










Finally, some more IK bones need to be added for easy bone movement. An IK bone was placed on the middle toe for toe and foot rotations, another below the heel for leg movement and bending, one on the back foot, and the last on the knee. IK constraints were applied to these bones to allow the manipulation.










The next thing to do is to get the bones ready for weight painting.