Devlog 2: Rigged (From The Start...?)

The activity for this week included modelling a simple character, and applying bones and rigging to them in order to correctly move and animate the character.

As said in the previous devlogs, modelling mainly consists of resizing, moving, cutting, and beveling mesh shapes to create the desired shapes. For my character, I settled on a low-poly version of a simply character.

My simple low-poly character, which took all too long...!

Following the model's creation, it was time to add a skeleton to the character - how else are they going to move? This included adding 'bones', which joints, which I added for her head, spine (x2), pelvis, shoulders, arms, hands, legs, and feet.

Their added skeleton (called an armature in Blender).

Now, we moved to the 'Animation' tab of Blender, where we could begin inserting key frames. Each key frame would contain a gradual movement by manipulating the skeleton, and then moving the animation timeline by a few frames (seconds). For a simple wave animation, I mainly moved the spine and arms, little by little.

The simple wave animation. Their arm looks a bit thin from being manipulated; that will be fixed eventually!