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Posing and animating using forward kinematics
Lesson 1: Skeletons and kinematics
Lesson 2: Smooth skinning
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.