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Posing and animating using forward kinematics

Lesson 1: Skeletons and kinematics

Lesson 2: Smooth skinning

 

Learning Resources > Tutorials > Getting Started with Maya > Character Setup > Lesson 1: Skeletons and kinematics > 

Beyond the lesson

In this lesson you learned how to:

• Create a skeleton with bones and joints.
• Pose the skeleton using Inverse Kinematics.

Additional things to consider when working with skeletons:

• The appropriate number of joints in a skeleton depends on the anatomical parts of the character you want to manipulate. More joints means finer control at the expense of greater complexity.
• As you created the skeleton in this lesson, you ended the arm’s joint chain at the wrist. This prevents you from animating hand motion. If you need to animate hand motion or even finger motion, you would need to make additional joints and IK handles. The same applies to foot and toe motion.
• When you create a skeleton, you can animate a character bound to it to produce natural skin deformations. Although you animated an unskinned skeleton in this lesson, it’s more common to animate a skinned skeleton. Binding a character is the topic of the next lesson.
• It’s typically best to animate the entire skeleton from pose to pose at desired frames. It’s hard to get desired results by animating one limb for a frame range, another limb for a frame range, and so on.

There are many other ways to work with skeletons not described in this lesson:

• You can blend or switch between IK and forward kinematics on joints controlled by an IK handle.
• There are other types of IK handles that provide different controls for manipulating parts of a skeleton. Especially noteworthy is the IK spline handle, which makes it easy to animate the twisting, wavy motion in tails, necks, spines, snakes, and so on.

For more details on these and other features, please refer to the Maya Help.