One of the core elements of character animation is rigging, within blender this entails creating ‘bones’ which can be assigned to different aspects of a model and then can be manipulated to create different poses or actions. Allowing 3D modellers/animators to quickly and easily create complex scenes and animations. This technique is much more efficient than the older stop motion method previously used for creating such animations and is now commonly used in both film and games design. In order to experiment with this technique I quickly modelled a character from a reference image found on google, it was not intended to be a perfect model but instead to allow me to try character rigging. I then set up a skeleton using the bone feature in blender and then using a combination of the pose mode and key frame animations set up a couple of short and simple animations as seen below…

I chose this action as it is simple to animate and it is an action which is easily recognisable. This was an action which I feel looks fairly realistic except from the lack of body rotation.

I chose this action as I thought It would be easy to animate however I think this is the least realistic of all the rigged animations I have made as the jump and landing do not reflect how this action would actually be performed.

I choose to attempt a walk cycle as this is one of the most common actions required for games and animations. I am happy with the way the walk turned out however I feel that the body does not move enough and I think that having a moving background would have enhanced the animation so I may include this in the future.

I wanted to include an interaction between two or more rigged characters and felt that a hi-five would be the easiest way to achieve this. I am not two happy with the end result as it looks quite unnatural due to a lack of body movement and the sharp and aggressive movement of the arms and hands.

This was a second attempt to include multiple rigged characters and was intended to be run on a loop. This was a more comical endeavour and hence does not look particularly realistic.