> Character Setup
> Lesson 1: Skeletons and kinematics
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Introduction |
After you model the surfaces that make up a human, animal, or other character, you create a skeleton and bind it to the character’s surface (called skin).
A skeleton provides a structure for animating the character. When you create a skeleton in Maya, you create a series of bones with joints in the skeletal locations where you want the character to bend or twist. (You can animate a skeleton without having a skinned character.)
In this lesson, you learn the techniques for creating a simple skeleton for a human character. You will learn how to:
- Create joints for a character.
- Name joints in the Hypergraph.
- Use symmetry when creating a character.
- Parent joints into an existing skeleton.
- Use Inverse Kinematics (IK) techniques to pose a skeleton.
Learning how to bind a character to a skeleton is described in the next lesson.