Animation

I am supposed to chose which area of 3D modelling i am to focus on but seeing that i haven't learnt anything in-depth about animation. I decided to take animating instead of focusing on modelling which is what i really wanted to do because I think it is much better to have a well rounded skill set than to be focused one skill in this case.

At first glance it looked hard very hard to animate things but in reality the hard part is actually setting up the bones on a mesh and assigning the weights on the individual joints.

Here are the most basic terms of which you will need to know to understand what i am talking about

 As far as i know there are 4 types of skinning (applying weights) a model.

• Wheight painting - Is the old school method of skinning where you had to apply the weights onto individuall vetecies
• Smooth bind - an updated vesion of weight painting. You no longer need to paint in the weights indivirually and it binds the mesh and the bones smoothly. It doesit automatically but you might not get the wanted result
• Rigid bind - same as smoothbinding but more rough on the binding
• Interactive bind - This is where you can individually determine in what range the joints of the bones are going to affect the mesh

Maya's automatic skinning is ok and is really useful. I have also tried to manually apply the weights which gives you much better control over what part of the mesh is going to be affected by the joints and bones.

I managed to make my character do a posing animation using bones

I also made an animation sequence but i have no idea how to either export it in to a game or make it in to a movie... yet