Today I will go into the process of adding joints and bones to the dragon model to make it possible to animate at a later date.
The first step is to add joints. These are chains of virtual pivut points that the model translates around. These joints need to be laid out to replecate the anatomy of the model, in this case the dragon.
The image above shows the joint layout in the default pose. In this instance the joints have been coloured, which is a result of the skinning process within Maya. Maya supports two main forms of skinning: smooth skinning and rigid skinning. Rigid skinning means that each individual vertex can only be moved by one bone. It takes little computational power to calculate, and is the technique used for many game engines.
In smooth skinning, each vertex can recieve influence from many bones, resulting in a more natural deformation of the mesh at the cost of a heavier calculation.
The rigging process does not end here, however. I am setting up this character with a system called Maya Muscle. In this system, you create bones that have a physical surface, and then add muscles to these structures. This results in the effect of skin sliding over bones and muscle, and can also add the subtle effect of the mass jiggling when it moves.
Here you can see the rig with most of the bones added in. Some of the more important bones are the shoulder blades, the hips and the ribs, as these can often be seen moving under the skin in real life animals. There doesn't need to be a high level of detail in these bones, as they will never be seen. They merely need to have volume and a suface to drive the skin mesh. The next stage is to add the muscles, and that will be revealed in next weeks post.
Until then,
Alex
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