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

Now let's look at where the bones should go. Move the bones to align them to the character sheet images using the front and side orthographic views. While most manuals teach you to place the bones in roughly the center of the geometry that you intend to attach, this is often not where bones are placed in the human body. As we saw in the opening examples, you can achieve some dramatic improvements in the realism of your model's animations with the application of some basic anatomical observations. I'll show some specific examples of how anatomical reference was used to guide the positioning of Anahani's bones in several areas.

The following tutorial is based on 3D Studio MAX and Character Studio, but many concepts can be applied to other modeling and animation tools. I use the basic Character Studio skeleton, so my skeleton is prebuilt and prelimited for me already. Another benefit of the Character Studio bones is that their axes are automatically aligned to the bone, which is not the case with standard 3D Studio MAX bones. Because you'll use the axis to build geometry onto the skeleton later, it's important, if you're using a different system, to build your skeleton with the axes aligned to the bones. Finally, note that our digital bones are really just straight lines between the axes, and are not the natural shape of human bones. Often, as we will see, the form of a human bone itself can be misleading, so it's important to closely examine the bone and accurately locate the rotational axis of a joint.