Introduction

For my final week of this trimester I was asked to try bone rigging which is basically instead of drawing animations from scratch each time you make a template like I did in anatomy and separate each body part into different layers. Then you take these, export them from Photoshop and import them into Unity, and yes I checked, it is only with Photoshop files that this works. Then once in Unity you can add bones throughout the object and give them connections so they know how to act, which should be fine, so what happened? Well it is building on anatomy which I hated, however I decided to give it a go anyways, so first we need a base to use this on.

Base

Okay so in anatomy I made two bases, one of a new character I didn’t like and one of my first character which was, okay. So I picked the second one which is this if you haven’t seen it:

I got this and separated them into different layers, which I just did by using the lasso tool and cutting and pasting them, then just cleaning up the edges with a brush. Then I just saved each part by themselves as transparent and used a drive to put them onto photoshop one by one, they were the same size at least so they slotted into place once I got them all together. Then I just saved it and dragged it into Unity.

Bone Rigging

Okay so I’ll admit, I didn’t finish this part, I just couldn’t get it to work in a way I liked, I followed what I did in the lessons but even in the lessons it seemed off. I’m not sure how, maybe because I couldn’t rotate the limbs, only move them? Or just because the physics was limiting what I wanted, however it also seemed to just not act right either. Like instead of turning the leg when moved it looks like it is just stretching the end of it instead which just kind of ruins it.

So yeah this was a nice idea but again it didn’t go very well, I see what it was going for, but it is again, a lot of work on top of the anatomy stuff which I didn’t like in the first place. So again I would rather just draw each animation myself, most of the upsides also aren’t really a loss for me either. It saves time, but that depends on how good you are as this definitely took longer for me than my normal process, it is less work which I disagree with honestly given how hard it has been for me, it gives realistic poses which with the physics is kind of right, however sometimes you don’t want realistic for that extra bit of character, especially depending on the style, lastly is it keeps the body consistent, but I showed last week you can compensate for that, do it seems pretty lackluster in my opinion.

Conclusion

I know I didn’t actually finish the work but if I couldn’t get the bone structure to work fully and went on to try making more animations than what I did last week for my player then I don’t think it would be worth the time honestly. So again sadly I feel like this was a wasted week, I liked the concept but it just wasn’t for me, but I suppose I wouldn’t have known that without trying it. So to end this I will probably not be touching this again as it was way too hard as an alternative to my art technique which I much prefer, especially with it being locked behind Photoshop and Unity, meaning I have to be on campus to use this at all. So just to end it, I see why others might like it, but it is not for me so I will not be touching it in the future