Orc Warrior #4 skinning and rigging

Back with the low poly Orc and I've skinned and rigged the blighter as promised. Below you can see the model in his stand pose, to the right you can see the underlying skeleton. The skeleton is what drives the animation, you assign parts of the poly mesh to the skeleton, so the head joint drives the head.

The next step is to rigg the character, the rigg is a set of controls that drive the skeleton. The controls need to be easy to work with, often one control will drive a set of joints like a leg for example.

After setting up the rigg I did a couple of animations, a walk cycle and an idle. The idle will be for the combat animations, I'm considering having a more relaxed idle that might be used for guard duty maybe with a conversation anim so Orcs can stand around shooting the breeze if wanted. Of course this may all be just idle talk that I wont get round to (crap joke intended). Anyway you can see the anims in the clip below.





I will be posting renders next and UV mapping goodness with bump maps specular and all the usual. I's all underway and will be with you next week, provided nothing else comes up (I was recently kidnapped by gnomes true story!). Below is a sneaky peek of early work in progress.

Grrrrr