Rigging bones and skin

After modelling my Dino character, the next step was to rig the bones to Dino. This is a really difficult thing to do. Before you even start doing this you need to know how many bones you will need to animate your character. For axample I knew I wouldn’t need to animate fingers so I didn’t put any bones there.

When I connected bones to Dino skin, I started thinking what kind of technique I should use for animation. Very helpful, at this stage, was storyboard (which I will show you later). I decided to do facial animation with “morpher” tool. At the beginning I wanted to use (as always in this kind of projects) very advances techniques like “biped” and “psyhique” to animate the rest of Dino body. As this would take me more time to make it ( my character animation for this 3 idents are not complicated) so I decided to use an easier way of animation
The animation of legs are done by using “IK solver”. Personally I don’t recommend to use “IK solver”. IK solver is mostly used in game animation. With IK solver you cannot really control the animation. With legs it works pretty well but it doesn’t really work for arms and backbones. So, the rest of the body I animated by moving and rotating each bone, only legs were animated with IK solver.

I also wanted to animate eyes. Eyes really give expressions and bring character to life. So it is important to take some time to animate them. I used the easiest way to do that. I created a “dummy” object, that eyes looked at.

To animate antennaes I used “flex” modiffier.