Making Joints and Skinning

To rig my model, I started by creating joints for it.

Knowing that I wanted my model to be able to move like a human would I decided to place the joints in a fashion that would make sense for a human skeleton, with a few additions to make sure the model would be able to, for example, have it’s ears and muzzle move.

I found this process to be quite simple as I’ve had experience with animating models that have a similar rig as they are humanoid models, therefore, I have a decent knowledge where I need to put joints to get the movement that I want.

Wanting to get an idea of how my model would move with the rig I created, I skinned the joints to my mesh. When I did this, I found that some of the joints would distort the mesh in areas that didn’t make sense, which is something I did not want as it is unrealistic to how the teddy bear would behave in real life. It is important to mention though that some of the behaviours, such as the chest distorting the waist, made sense.

To eliminate this issue, I chose to break down the hierarchy I had created for the joints and individually bind the skin to them, then put the back into that hierarchy. You’ll notice that I didn’t do separate the muzzle and nose, this was because I found that the nose would no longer move with the muzzle when I did so.

This stopped the mesh from distorting in undesirable ways and gave the effect of how a knitted bear would move due to how it is made – I mentioned this in more detail in part 3.

Now that I have the joints where I want them, next time I’m going to add IK handles to the legs, this will allow me to have an easier time when animating later on as it enables me to move the body without moving the position of the legs. In addition, the IK handles will make it so that as you move the legs it bends at the knee automatically, which, for example would make animating walk cycles easier.