Week 16

This week I learnt how to create bones and manipulate them, here is how I created a human arm using bones.

I then used dummy objects such as text or spline objects to link to the bones so that when you have to move them around under the skin it’s a lot easier to find and move them within having to find the bones through the limbs.

I used the ‘IK limb solver’ to link the 3 bones together so that they move realistically when animated.
I clicked on each bone and the joint where it would move.

I then created a cylinder on the stage and scaled it to the correct size of the bones and placed it over the bones to conceal them.
I then added the skin modifier to the cylinder and used the skin modifier options to ‘add’ the bones to the skin modifier.

I selected the ‘edit envelopes’ button then used the move tool to alter how much strength and control each bone has on a limb.

I also used a ‘Biped’ to play around with joint movement and to see how it should look for a normal bone structure,

I made the biped walk by moving different bones to see how the joints would work and to make the movements resemble a humans.


I also found this online tutorial a lot of help and very simple, ‘http://www.spoono.com/3ds/tutorials/tutorial.php?id=7’

After I had played around with bones and the Biped I started creating a blender for the 3rd animation where the chef makes a soup and pours it into a bowl then adds croutons.

I stared with creating the base of the blender by using a box, I then added 4 cylinders as the legs to go under the box at each corner,

To get the slope at the front of the box I cloned the main box and angled it to the same degree as I wanted the slope then place the cloned box over the main box and used the Boolean tool to delete the cloned box and to make the original box have a sloped front.


I then created the 2 buttons on the sloped face of the rectangle, the first button I created is a knob which is going to control the speed of the blender, I made this with creating a cylinder to lay parallel with the slope and another cylinder angled at 90 degrees to the first rectangle which will be used to rotate the knob.

I then went on to creating the On/Off flick switch, to do this I created box and cloned it twice and angled the cloned boxes above the original one but tilting in towards the center of the 1st box, I then used the ‘ProBoolean’ tool to removed the cloned boxes and leave the original box with a gentle ‘V’ shape in it, so make it look like a realistic switch.


I then added text to the front slope of the box where the buttons are, I added 3 different sets of text, the first set was the numbers ‘1,2,3’ these will be used for the speed setting above the knob, the second set of text is for the make of the blender I made up a random name ‘Slick Mix 10’ and the third set of text are the words ‘On, Off’ for the on and off switch.

Once I had created the text I right clicked on it and selected ‘convert to editable poly’ then I selected ‘polygon’ then finally selected ‘extrude.’

I then clicked and dragged over the text to highlight the text I want to extrude then I dragged the text out so it was 3 dimensional to the thickness I wanted it, then I placed it onto the front of the rectangle and around the knob in the middle and above and below the switch.

Now all I have to do is create the jug for the blender, the blades and the rotation mechanism to blend up the soup.