HA14 Task 04 – Puppet Build

For this project, I was given an arm, a leg, and a body, and was tasked with creating, rigging and animating the puppet shown below.

(Source)

 To start with, I had 1 arm and 1 leg, split into two pieces, and a body. The first thing I did was to select the leg and cut-paste it onto a separate layer. Then I selected the bottom section and used the move tool to lift it up to the rest of the leg. The leg was then placed near the edge of the body.

Next, I took the arm and moved that to another layer too. I centered the pieces, rotated them 90 degrees on their side and moved the pieces together. After connecting the pieces I had the arm line up with one of the rings on the outside of the body.

There was also a small 'head' on top of the body, which I put together using the same methods as the limbs.

With the limbs put together, I selected both of their layers and copy-pasted them, rotated them 72 degrees clockwise, and repeated until there was 5 of each limb. With this done, the puppet was built.

The puppet was going to be put into layout for animation, so I had to create bones. I created bones for the upper and lower legs, 2 bones for the upper arms and 1 large bone for the lower arms, and one large bone in the centre of the body. 

To stop the bones from affecting anything except the limbs they are attached to, I had to create weight maps for each section of the arms and legs. To make it easier to identify and attach the weight maps I coloured each leg distinctly different colours, and named the weight maps after each colour.

With the weight maps and bones added to the puppet, I could import it into Layout, ready for rigging and animation.