Bones

[carlf]

I'm creating an animation of a person walking down some steps.

I started with "Eddie" and got him walking down the steps ok, but in scaling his feet up to what I considered to be about the right size for the steps it seems that his legs are very short.

 

So I want to scale his legs up (longer). That screws up the bones.

 

In trying to fix the bones I reviewed the "Show some backbone" tut. The book has more detail than the video, but still leaves something to be desired. His lower legs seem to work, but his upper legs kinda crimp. This raises a broader question.

 

Is there a better reference available that gives a lot of detail about how to set up bones, exactly?

(Anybody have a suggestion about where I can get more realistically proportioned human figures to use?)

 

Thanks,

Carl

[robcat2075]

Why not just scale the whole character so it's the right size for the steps?

 

Select it in director mode and scale.

[Kelley]

(Anybody have a suggestion about where I can get more realistically proportioned human figures to use?)

 

Look in 'All Libraries' in the folder 'AM Extras CD Vol.1' There's a lot of good stuff in there.

[carlf]

Why not just scale the whole character so it's the right size for the steps?

 

Select it in director mode and scale.

 

Sorry, I missed this post until now.

 

The problem, as I see it, is that the legs are out of scale in proportion to the feet.

Scaling the whole character doesn't help that.

 

I was able to stretch the lower legs and then readjust the bones, but it is less than perfect.

I would like to understand more about the complex process of using bones so that I can know how to connect them so that they work like they should.

 

Also, the character is wearing shorts. When his legs bend a certain way the legs "pass through" the shorts. It's not very realistic.

It seems to me that this is where smart skin comes in, but again, I would like to undestand how to make smartskin work for me. I know there is a brief smartskin tut, but it is not comprehensive enough for me to understand how to make the character work better....

 

Speaking of better, I would prefer to have the character wear long pants. Clearly this is a more complex structure, but I'd like to get there, if I knew how.

 

Carl

[carlf]

(Anybody have a suggestion about where I can get more realistically proportioned human figures to use?)

 

Look in 'All Libraries' in the folder 'AM Extras CD Vol.1' There's a lot of good stuff in there.

 

As a rank newbie, I'm having trouble just knowing how to use them, but even so, what I'm doing is a close-up of the legs and feet and the shoes that these guys are wearing are just black blobs.

Faced with the choice of fixing the proportions of the Eddie character vs. remaking the shoes of the adult characters on the CD, I chose to stretch Eddie's legs. The CD characters seem to still be pretty much charicatures and not really well proportioned people.

 

At least the white soles and shoe laces on the Eddie character's shoes have enough cues to read as shoes without doing that much work (I did alter them quite a bit, besides making the laces a LOT shorter.)

 

Thanks for the suggestion, anyway.

 

Still looking...

Carl