Jack Skellington

Or Delgo Skellington rather. Just finished creating the skeleton for my little character here. You can see the skeleton under the skin in the first picture there. I decided to give a rear view, since the front side was getting a little boring. Anyway, the second image shows just the skeleton, which isn't all that impressive since there's no 3d bone structure, like a skull or anything. Great, I hear you say, now you're all ready to animate him. Well... not exactly no.

Right now the skeleton isn't connected to the mesh at all, so the next step is to skin the character, which means connect the "skin" to the skeleton and make sure that the arms and legs move without big creases in them so it's relatively natural. I guess I'm mostly just uploading pictures at the end of each stage, but I guess that's ok for now. Maybe I'll do some true WIP pics later on in a more complex project. Great, I hear you say again, so once the skinning is done, it's on to the walk cycle! Well... hang on again.

After skinning comes blend shapes, where I can make some facial expressions which I can setup independent of bones to help me animate the face later on. (I don't really know how facial animation will play into a walk cycle, but I'm sure it's important. I know I make faces while I'm walking...) Then comes inverse kinematics, which is a more natural way of moving multiple bones. When you lift your foot, you're telling your ankle and foot to move upwards and you don't even think about your knee or hip, even though those joints are part of the process. IK makes animation easier that way, so I need to set that up as well. Then comes more rigging, which sets up things like eye movement, vertex jiggle (who knew...?) and creating a character set (I guess I'll find out about that too). THEN we get to the walk cycle.

I have to remind myself that my 30-day trial is going to expire on March 21st, and I still have three and a half projects to work through in this book. We'll see how far I get. Anyway, things are going to get more interesting and maybe you'll get to see some poses beyond your typical arms spread out, eyes straight ahead deal.

Until later,
Stuart