HA14 Task 05 – Puppet Rig

After building the puppet in Modeler, I imported it into Layout. The first thing I needed to do was connect the bones to puppet, so I can move the limbs about.

To connect the bones, I selected the first layer (the puppet), clicked on the Bones tab and clicked Properties. In the properties menu I selected the bones from layer 2 to be be used by the puppet.

With the bones and puppet connected, I am able to rotate and move each part of the puppet individually, but at this point when I move the limbs they slightly affect other limbs and move them too. This is why I created weight maps during the puppet build.

The weight maps anchor the bones to specific parts of the puppet, and make them unable to affect anything but where the weight map is. This was extremely important for the legs, as they all start off close to each other.

With a bone selected, I clicked on Properties, and went to the Bone Weight Map section, where I selected the relevant weight map. At first I had the Use Weight Map Only box ticked, but I discovered that it stopped my bones from working at all.