Introduction Case Study: Jack Nichoolas 5 What's A character sheet? Deconstructing the body Creating the Pelvis The Spine The Shoulders The Elbows The Knee As Tools Evolve, Concepts Remain Valid

A good character model has to fulfill two requirements: it has to look great and it has to animate well. The aesthetic quality and technical functionality of your model are deeply intertwined. Aesthetically, you want a model that really captures the details of the original design. Technically, you want to maintain a model's character traits as it animates.

As character modelers, we're carrying on a figurative, sculptural tradition that is as old as art itself. And computer graphic art represents some stunning figurative sculpture - just look at the beautiful, high-resolution versions of characters from Tekken 3 and Mortal Kombat 4. While we digital sculptors seem to be creating better-looking characters, creating characters that animate well is a new challenge that can make or break a game.

Creating a model that can look good in the da Vinci pose and perform all of the exotic movements that today's games require is a daunting task. Fortunately, we can take cues from human anatomy to solve the puzzle.

A character model and skeleton is a large and complex hierarchy. As such, problems that exist at or near a model's base (root) will propagate throughout the entire figure. Conversely, changes to the root can propagate improvements as well.