Character Rigging

Instead of using bones to rig and animate my character, I used a Biped. I created a biped the same size as my character and chose Male from the body type. I then scaled and rotated the arms, legs, etc. so they filled the character mesh.

After I had positioned and scaled the biped I applied the Physique modifier to the character mesh. I clicked the ‘Attach to node’ button then clicked the biped’s pelvis, finally i clicked ‘Initialized’ from the ‘Physique Initialization’ window.



After I moved some of the biped limbs to check how the mesh had applied to the biped, I discovered some of the vertices on the left thigh were applied to the right thigh bone, and vice verse. To fix this, I selected the vertex option from the Physique modifier, and began removing vertices from bones and applying them to the correct bones.



To test how my character mesh animated, I found an example biped animation of a wild west gun slinger on the Internet, which I loaded into my biped.