Bond

I finished the person model that I was creating and then added the hand model to the mesh. I had to join and reposition some of the vertices in the arm as there weren’t the same amount of vertices in the end of the hand and the arm. I could have done with adding some more edge loops to the arm but I didn’t want to have to adjust the rest of the model as this looked ok.
The model contained some lumps and bumps that could be removed with more time but it looks ok with a turbosmooth applied. The model could be improved by sorted out to topology so that the edges flow better. Some parts of the model don’t look perfectly correct and I had problems with the mouth. When the turbosmooth was added the mouth opened further than I had expected. By adding some more vertices and adjusting them I was able to fix the mouth.

To model the hair I cloned some of the polygons from the head to a new object and then added a shell modifier to create some height to the polygons. I don’t know if this is the right way to go about it but it worked ok. I didn’t want to create hair using hair and fur as this wouldn’t have gone with the character who looked more cartoony.

I collapsed the modifiers and then edited the vertices. I was going to apply a turbosmooth but decided not to as it looked too smooth with this applied.

I decided to model the clothes as separate objects as I thought that this would make it easier to change the clothes for the different scenes and to create the different characters.

I tried to use the garment maker but did not succeed so decided to use a similar way to how I modelled the hair.

I cloned the man model and then deleted the head, legs and hands so that I could make a shirt. I scaled the section that was left so that it was larger than the character and moved it into place before scaling specific sections and moving vertices to stop parts of the character showing through the clothes. Then I modelled detail onto this, like creating a collar. I used the same method to model the shoes, jacket and trousers.

After having modelled Bond I used the biped to rig the model. I changed the biped parameters so that the biped had fingers but no toes, as Bond is wearing shoes. I added a biped positioned it in place and scaled the sections to the correct size.

In the motion panel I used copy posture button to copy the position of bones on one side then with the bone on the other side selected I used the paste posture opposite button to position the bone in the same way on the other side. I could have used the symmetrical button to copy the adjustments made to the bones on to the one on the other side but I had already started moving the bones before finding out about this.

I then added a skin modifier to the mesh and added the bones for the biped to the skin modifier.

Animating with Bones

I imported torso object and added a turbosmooth modifier to it. I added bones and positioned them in orthographic view (top, left and front) by rotating and moving them into place.

I named each of the bones so that they could be easily identified. I adjusted the front, side and back fins for each bone and then repeated the steps for the other arm.

I selected the end bone that is joined to the hand bone and selected the IK limb solver and then selected the first bone (upper arm).

Adding a skin modifier to the torso model and selecting the bones that had been created allowed the torso model to move when the arm bones were moved.

A bone was added for the body and included in the skin modifier like the other bones so that the body would not deform when moving the arms.

I edited the envelopes for each bone to define how much of the torso mesh should deform when moving the arm bones.

Red is used to show the part of the mesh that will be effect most by that bone and the blue parts will be least affected by the bone.

It was difficult to adjust these properly so that arm would move properly without the other parts deforming.