SOFT WARE: BLENDER
Making bones in Blender is a simple task and requires little technical knowledge. That being said, having a solid understanding of how bone chains work, especially in humans, will stand you in good stead for creating realistic and believable movements. In answer to this question, we won’t cover the latter, but a simple Google or YouTube search will help you understand this more.
You would be forgiven for thinking the creation of bone structures is only applicable to animated characters, but that’s only one small application. In reality, anything that you want to animate could benefit from this type of structure. A robot is a great example, and I don’t just mean a human-like character; I mean any machine that has moving parts. Animating individual parts of a moving machine is tiring and laborious, especially if each part has an impact on the location and rotation of the other parts. This becomes infinitely easier with bones.
When we’re talking about bones in Blender, we need to use the language of armatures, which mimic skeletons. An armature is made out of bones that, when chained together, can make wonderfully complex mechanisms. The bones within armatures can be moved, rotated, and even scaled in order to accurately reflect the types of movement and interac tion that are required.
It’s not necessary for bones to be connected to each other, but if you want to replicate realistic movement, then more often than not it’s better to create chains of bones, which in turn replicate limbs in your armature. An obvious example when thinking about bone chains would be the arm and leg bone structures. Everything after the shoulder towards the hand will move together.
As an example, an elbow’s movement affects the bones that it’s connected to, and this allows for coordinated movement. In any armature, connec ting the bones together and specifying which are the parents of others will help to create a hierarchy, so the priority of movement is set. It’s also possible for a parent to have several children, so that one parent bone influences multiple other bones or chains of bones. The bone at the beginning of a chain is called the root bone.
Creating armatures is also really fun, and it’s great to see how easy it is to set up animated characters that can move with the adjusting of only a few simple bones. In answer to this question, we’re going to use a human mesh from the Blender Studio and its community, and create our own animated person.
EXPERT TIP
If you find your character or machine needs to rep
