In-Class Exercise 10

This exercise was all about Rigging and Skinning, for this task I was given a already made scene with a model of a human hand in it. My job was to use the rigging tools to create a skeleton for the hand using a series of joints position in realistic places withing the hand. I can see this tool being useful for making animations involving models with multiple moving parts such as an Imperial AT-AT moving, the Create Joints tool would be used to give the animator a large amount of control over how he animated the movement of the legs and the head. However I do not think that this tool will be useful for my animation as I do not have any moving parts on my models except the wings on my shuttle which I will probably animate a different way if I choose to make them move for my final animation. The second part of the task was to use Skinning, this is used to bind the skeleton I created to the mesh of the object so that when you edit the skeletons joints it will effect the mesh and move it accordingly. I found the skinning part rather difficult as is was hard to get the area that the skeleton affected to cover the exact area that it needed to which led to a deformed looking finger when I attempted to move the skeleton.