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.

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.