The Silly Walk

I’m still finding the technical side of animating in Blender a very steep slope to climb for the first time. This weekend saw very few successes. I’m having real difficultly taking the figures I’m modeling outside Blender and importing them in a way that makes it an easy process to then connect them to the armature (the bones) that will give them character movement.

I’ve also changed my approach. Here, I’ve modeled separate the clothes – jacket, trousers, shirt, tie – from the body. It’s probably the way I need to work but, as you can see, I’m struggling to stop the underlying meshes from poking through when the figure is walking. I’ve made the jacket red so I can see problems with the surface mesh, particular on the right where I’ve not distributed the influence (or weight) that each bone has as it deforms the overlying surface. It’s precisely the sort of problem that keeps cropping up and are making it hard for me to produce anything of particular merit.