Tutorial 2 - Bones

In this tutorial, we had to animate a human torso. In this post, I am going to describe and show how I did it.

First of all, I imported a sample torso into 3D Studio Max. After smoothing it to make it look more realistic and less angled, I used the Bone tool to create the arms and give them a realistic shape. The image below shows the bones that have just been created in all 4 view ports.

Next, I made the body transparent and added fins to the bones. This is so that the bones move with the skin and gives the skin its shape. The image below shows this. Then I had to use the IK limb solver to make the bones move in a more realistic way.

I had to create a bone which runs through the body which would connect the shoulders. This way, it will give the torso more realistic movement as well when the arms move. Again, bone fins were added and extended so that they were touching the skin. It does not matter if the bones extrude because when the shape is eventually rendered, they are not displayed on screen.

 

As you can see from the image below, when the envelope view is selected, and the arm is moved, it is still not moving in a natural way. Using envelope view, you can adjust how much the movement affects the other connecting parts of the arm.

The idea is to create the most red around the joint as possible and becoming more yellow and blue as it travels outwards. The two images below show the envelope view of the torso.