Making the character sit down

Now that the props have been created, and my character is created with bones, I thought that it would be an ideal time to make my character sit and be ready to play cards. This meant that I now had to skin the mesh to the bones of the legs. I decided to do it this way simply because there was no need for me to skin the entire body, so I skinned the legs and will do the arms later. The rest of the body will remain static. So, I first started by selecting the mesh on the legs. (This included the trousers and shoes). I then went to the modifier list and selected 'skin'. Within the parameters, I was able to select the bones that it was to be skinned to. Having selected the relevant bones, I then used the envelope tool within the skin sub-menu. This then enabled me to choose the vertices that were relevant to that particular bone. This took a very long time and a lot of trial and error. Often, I was unaware of how the mesh would move when I moved a bone until I actuallly moved it. After a lot of trial and error, I was then able to make the legs to be roughly at a right angle.

It made sense to place the character in it's correct location where it would appear for the entire animation. Placing it amongst the crops that I had already created made my character come to life, and I can now vision how the final animation will look.

Having had endless problems with rigging the leg mesh to the bones, I was hoping that the arms would be slightly easier. This was not the case. The first thing that I noticed with the arm bones was that when I moved them, they grew in length, to the point where when they were vertical to his body, they touched the floor. Having spent a couple of hours trying to overcome this, I decided to delete the current bones and create new ones. I then attached them to the previous bones and linke them in the correct fashion. Fortunately, they now work as I had hoped. Yet again, I had endless problems with the envelopes on the bones, and it took a long time to select the relevant vertices and ensure that they are highlighted in the relevant colour so that the mesh picks them up correctly. After a very long time, the arms finally moved as I required. However, there were some unacceptable creases on the arm mesh that I needed to sort out. Even though there are still some creases in the mesh, these look realistic as with any clothing a character will have some creases. Below shows how the character now looks: