Bones Tutorial      by Brett Fattori Part I   Creating the Skeleton   We're going to assign a skeletal structure to the object that you see here. Objects like this are all too common on the web. I found this object at 3D Cafe. Thanks to the author of this object I have been able to learn, myself, how to use bones in trueSpace 4. When "boning" an object, it is important to be as non-complex as you can be. You have to avoid putting bones in every place that they appear in humans. If we modeled the ear bones and rib cage and on and on, we'd be at it for hours, plus we'd have to manipulate way to many bones to make an animation look good. Looking at the object here, we can see that it can be broken down into 4 major parts. We have the head, arms, torso and legs. We're not going to concern ourselves with animating the fingers or toes, so we'll just assign 1 bone per hand and foot. Also, we're going to have that ponytail be part of the head... so one bone for the head. Each arm is two bones, and each leg is as well. The torso consists of two bones as well, so we have a total of 15 bones for the object.   The bones in figure 1 are getting a little complex, but mainly because we are adding the ponytail to the skeletal structure in that exercise. We aren't going to go into that much detail in this tutorial, but the image shows what a well laid out skeletal structure can look like. It is simple and will work with the object well. It is close to the original bone count of 15, which is probably ideal for simple animation of a walk cycle.   Remember that we want to avoid a complex skeleton. If we have it too complex, we'll be animating unnecessarily when it comes time to do walking, running, jumping and dancing. A simple skeleton is always a great idea. © Copyright 1998, Brett Fattori    Next    Previous    Tutorials Index