KIT 207 week 2 self-study: Rigging and animation

I have modelled a character, made a rig for it, and made some animations for it.

Since this was the first character I ever made in Blender, I decided to go with a simple, boxy look. Everything was made to have this look - the arms, the legs, the body and head. Perhaps the most complex part of the model was the hair, which I made by lowering and raising some vertices on the top of the head, thus making some slopes and points that vaguely resemble hair. I also made some protrusions on the front of the head for eyes; they're hard to see in the images.

The rig was not too hard to make. Rigging involves giving the character a 'skeleton' of sorts to make it able to pose. This is done by making bones which correspond to a part of the body. For example, my character's arms have three bones each: one for the hand, one for the forearm, and one for the shoulder. Ditto for the legs. I have bones representing the spine, comprising of the body, neck, and head.

My rig was slightly altered from the one exported to Unity, by including another bone for the body.

Finally comes the animation. In blender, animation is as simple as posing your character, adding a keyframe, and posing it again, and keyframing it again. Blender 'interpolates' the keyframes - that is,  generates an animation that moves one pose to another. In both the walking and waving animations, posing was an easy ordeal. The trickiest part was to make them look natural, has they have a robotic movement at first. I was able to tweak the keyframes' type to make the animation more to my liking.

You may notice that parts of the body move with the arms and legs. There is a way to prevent that from happening, by painting weights on the model. However, I found it hit-or-miss from my own experience, and so I decided not to bother with it for now.