2010

Table Of Contents
3 Select Skeleton > IK Handle Tool.
4 Click right_shoulder, then click right_wrist. This creates an IK handle for
the right arm.
5 Practice posing and animating the handles.
Posing and animating using forward kinematics
As the last part of the lesson, you can optionally practice posing and animating
the character by rotating joints that are not controlled by IK handlesthe
ball joints of the feet, and joints from the back_root through the upper_neck.
Rotating such joints is forward kinematics.
With the exception of the back_root, youll invariably rotate rather than move
the joints that arent part of an IK handle. If you move the joints, the bones
lengthen. This deforms bound skin undesirably unless you are creating
cartoon-like distortions.
Because youve already set keys for IK handles, some joint rotations on non-IK
handle joints will be restrained by the IK handle positioning. If this interferes
with the intended poses, you can remove all prior animation from an IK handle
by selecting Edit > Keys > Delete Keys. You can also use Delete Keys to remove
all animation from keys youve set with forward 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 arms 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.
332 | Chapter 7 Character Setup