Tuesday, 9 March 2010

Bones and envelopes.

Now that the skin of the body is nearly complete. I need to create the bones, or it to be able to move.The bones were found in the Command Panel, Create Tab, Systems and then Bones.

To create the bones, I made the skin see through by right I can easily see where I want the bones to go.on the body and selecting see through.

Now that the body is see through, I can see where I wanted the bones to be. I stared off with the stomach. I started off with the backbone, and created the spine by just creating a number on bones in a straight line in the middle of the back.


Click and drag for each bone you want to create. This is a fairly simplistic IK chain and will only require four bones, for the hip, knee, ankle, and toes. Right-click to end the chain.



For the spine the bones were dragged down to the bottom in a straight line in the middle of the body. Once at the bottom of the stomoch, a bone like a tailbone was created to have more control over the bum.

To make it easier to see the bones, and to know where they control they can be made bigger by changing the bone parameters.




All of the body parts shoul be boned. according to the muscles of the body, this is so that movement can be made easier.



Envelopes


By selecting multiple body parts and putting a skin to it, it makes there an easyier way to give each bone an area to control.



Now that all the boens have been made, they can be skinned to the limbs. This can be done by selecting the limb, for example starting with the arms, all the arm skin can be selected and go to modify on the command panel.





In the command Panel>Skin




In the parameters roll out then select Add Bone and select all the bones that are in the arms.





* This was quite difficult as I Had't before hand named all of the bones to what they actually are. Once I had realised my mistake I went back and named every bone, like arm1, arm2, arm3, so I knew which part of the body they belonged too.














Now that it is linked to the skin this may not be the end. Even though the limb has been selected that is wanted to move, sometimes part of it may not move, or on the other hand, sometimes some of the vertices's of the object move when they are not wanted. Below is an example of this error.




This is where envelopes come in.



To edit the envelopes, select the limb and go to edit envelopes which is at the top of the roll out, above "Add Bone".




If any of the bones are selected, it provides a highlighted area of the bone, with a red shape around it. This shape controls how much control the bone has over the limb. When the shape is moved this changed the colour of the vertices's or the limb, red means it is controlled completely by the bone, and orange is slightly less, blue is still affected but not as much.











Below is the arm, boned perfectly, showing how fixing the envelopes right makes the movement soft and lifelike.













Multiple objects can be selected and skinned to a bone, for example, I wanted the spine to control, the neck, breasts torso and dress, as they are all in the same area., by selecting all of these and doing the same as before,







*Remember that when first fixing the bones to the limb, the object should be at its most normal, hiding the mesh smooth and other affects. This was realised and much time was spent, when the leg of the character would not bone, this was fixed once no effects were visible.













Once all the body parts have been boned, they were tested to make use that they were all moving the right parts and nothing was being pulled in the wrong direction. They were tested by selecting bones, moving them and looking in all the view ports to make sure they were moving correctly. Undo was then pressed so that the skeleton was then back in its original position.















Problems






I had many problems with the envelopes and I had to re skin lots of the bones, as they easily get attached to many wrong vertices's.




When skinning the feet and legs, this was were the most of the problems I encountered were as all the objects were close together, they seemed to try to attach to either side easily.


To fix this problem I had to exclude vertices's which weren't part of the leg, and dress. I had to keep testing and moving around the ones to make sure that vertices's weren't selected when they shouldn't have been.






As you can see in the image below, there are many verticies, so by leaving some out which are supposed to be affected, not attaching verticies is as much as a problem as attaching too many.

Now all the envelopes have been sorted for now I can move on to animating Lola.








My characters profile



My character is called LoLa



She is late 20's , a Lively, vivacious girl.



Shes very flirty, and known for it.



She is based on the Idea of Jessica Rabbit, being sexy and flirtatious yet unavailable.




Just like Jessica Rabbit, the shape of a women is sexy, My character has big breasts, and a big bum.


The breasts

After doing some research and common knowledge, I found that a feminine physical attribute is cleavage, as large breast size is a trait considered feminine. This can be suggested by visual clues, such as the cleavage between breasts. Many women will emphasize this by wearing things which push them up and together to enhance femininity.Some people regard use of cleavage as a form of feminine flirting or seduction, within the confines of community.


(Salmansohn, Karen 2007) (Desmond Morris)


Dress

Tight dresses, which emphasize all womanly features are used to do exactly that, an example of this mimicked a corset. A corset is a garment worn to mold and shape the torso into a desired shape for aesthetic or medical purposes. In recent years the term corset has also been borrowed by the fashion industry to refer to tops which to varying degrees mimic the look of traditional corsets without actually being one. These have very little affect, if any, on the shape of the wearers body.(Steele, Valerie(2001))



HIgh Heels
High Heeled Footwear is footwear that raises the heel of the wearers foot significantly higher that the toes. They give the aesthetic illusion of longer, more slender and more toned legs. High heels however have been blamed for reducing women into a sex object, however this is argued as they become a part of normal life, and a womanly attribute.



Hips
Females, tend to have large hips this occurs as part of the pubertal process, this affects their walking style, resulting in a hip sway.Females hips are generally wider than female shoulders.