Task 5 - Puppet Rig

Puppet Rigging

Upon the colours being added to my Puppet Animation, I began adding Bone Armatures to the limbs of the puppet, in order to give the puppet more complexity when animated. Bone Armatures were added to the arms, legs and head. Upon their creation, I entered pose mode in order to test the movement of the limbs and wire-frame mode, to adjust the armatures place within the limbs. I then gave the puppet a spine, should my animation call for more complexity. A spine would allow the puppet to fold if need be. I then extruded my bone armatures for the puppets limbs from the spine, in order to give the puppet a full skeleton. Once all the needed armatures were created, the bones were joined to the puppets body. This was made easier, by putting the bone into x-ray mode, which allowed me to see the bones, even in object mode. Upon all armatures being joined, the puppet rigging was complete. 

I added my first bone armature, which I then entered in pose mode and then rotated in order to test if  they would move properly for the animation process.

A spine was added, in order to extrude the bone armatures from, which would give the puppet a full spine. 

As can be seen, the rigging didn't go entirely to plan, which began to be sorted during the skinning process.

Puppet Skinning

Once the rigging of the puppet was complete, the puppets skinning began. The puppet has to have its vertex groups open. By doing so, a specific bone armature can be selected, and the part of the body its joined to can be seen via using the A key to select all joined parts of the body assigned to that armature. By doing this, the parts attached to a certain armature can be seen by the modeller, allowing for any parts not needed to be separated from that armature. As can be see below, this is the process I undertook in order to smooth out the animations for my puppet. 

In this screenshot, the body parts armature 12 are attached to, are highlighted via using the vertex group option of Blender. This can be used to unassign bone armatures from parts of the body that they should be attached to. This allows for smoother animations.