Bone animation Sample Tutorial

1. Load the Bone setup. It has four IK Handlers: Left/Right Legs and Left/Right Hands.

2. Load your skin, and position them correctly. If skin pose is not positioned according to the bones, resize/ scale the skin and/or move the IK handlers correctly before binding. After that, select "Back_root" and the Body and do "Skin->Bind skin->Smooth Bind"
3. Lets try to do a simple walk cycle.

Before you do anything, please make sure:
A. You put the model EXACTLY where you want it to be. This is important to establish the origin bone pose to do further animation. How do you position the model+bone? you need to select :
- All the Four IK Handlers

- The "Back_root" joint
and use the Move tool to move the whole thing to your desired location.

B. After you move the IKHandlers+back_root, make sure you are at frame 1 and press "S" to set the key frame.

Now, slide the slider to frame 5. lets move the legs, the arms, like this position:


Then you select all IK Handlers + Back_root, move the model forward a bit, and set the key. If you play the animation, you will see how he will start moving forward.

4. Again, move the slider to frame 10. Use the ik handlers to adjust the legs + arms, and Select the IK handlers+Back_root, move forward a bit, and press S again to set key.
5. again....frame 15
6. again....frame 20

7. again....frame 25

8. Finally....frame 30.
9. This is cool stuff: Try to copy the keyframes so far (Shift mouse select drag and copy), and choose : Paste Connect.
Now the animations from 1-30 will be copied and put relative to the final frame! so now the walk cycle plays twice.


10. now lets export this to fbx. Again, highlight all the iK handlers+ back_root and also the Model (body).
Please remember to slide the timer back to frame 1 !!!

11. choose : File->Export Selection and choose a filename.
It will launch the fbx exporter dialog.

12. Take note of the essential options


13. Now it should be exported correctly to fbx! How to test? Well unfortunately there's no easy way, so i need to import it into xna first and test it before we jump into joy :P

In summary, this is whats important when animating:

Rule no 1: Always highlight the IKHandlers and Back_root (the root node in the skeleton) and set key frame at frame 1 before any animation.

Rule no 2: Always highlight the IKHandlers and Back_root (the root node in the skeleton) and set key frame for each modified ik handlers/ rotation.

Rule no 3: if you need to rotate the model, try rotating the back_root first. then you move the ik handlers accordingly.

I hope this guide helps everyone when animating!