Welcome to the introduction to armatures in this video you will learn about the armature object and
add an armature to your model.
So let's hop straight on over into blender.
Right.
So over in blender The first thing that I'm going to do is actually just take a step away from our model
for the moment so we can play with armatures by themselves.
There's nothing else cluttering up the screen.
So I'm going to go find new and get a new file loaded with this new blender file.
Let's go ahead straightaway and add in an armature now an armature is an object much like our mesh object
like lamps like cameras in our scene.
So it's an object that can be manipulated it has a centre a position of rotation.
You can scale it up and down you can do lots with it.
So let's go in and one now so you can see what it looks like.
I'm going to use a shift and a.
And that was lucky it was right underneath the cursor.
And I'm going to add an arm which you can see there.
It says single bone.
Incidentally that's not just luck.
During my practice this is the last thing I chose.
So when you go and add something would shift in a and in many other places in blender it remembers the
last place you selected.
In this case it was an arm which a single bone.
So it appears there straight away.
Assuming that's the next thing you want to do as well.
Nice to time saving feature of blender though can be confusing we don't know why it's doing that.
We click that.
And one of your first questions will be I can't see it.
Mike where is it.
Well first of all it's within that cube.
I can guarantee that and it does say armature over in the outline so no it does exist.
So how do we make it so we can see it without hiding the objects especially if we're going to use these
armchairs to control our mesh objects.
Well let's have a look at the properties tab over here for the arm which is we've got the little stick
figure over here.
Now this gives us an option to name our armature.
Now an armature consists of a series of bones within it.
In this case we've only got one bone in one arm chair.
And in general you'll probably not want to have more than one arm chair in your particular scenes at
one time for a particular object.
So if you had two people in a scene or since we're working on the lamp two lamps in your scene you'd
have an armature per lamp itself.
In fact with a lamp you could probably copy the armature across duplicate it and use it as a template
armature for the other lamp unless there was some really big differences between them.
Let's go down we got the skeleton.
Got pole position and rest position and then if we keep going down we've got display.
Okay so ok to he draw stick be bone envelope and why simply change how armature looks but we still can't
see it at the moment.
So put a tick in the box called x ray.
Now we can see it and I'm going to hit the full stop on the number pad you could go to view and did
the same thing.
And we can actually see our bone now through any objects that might be in the way.
And that's a great way of being able to see what's going on.
Obviously when you're when they're inside a model like that you can't really have great control over
them because you well you can't see what's going on.
It's as simple as that turning on x-ray allows you to see the bones of the armature.
Now a couple of other things that you may want to turn on and off just so you can get a bearing of what's
going on.
So we've got names and that'll turn on the name it's just called bone at the moment if we were to add
another bone that would be bone 0 0 or 1 and then we've got the axes themselves ability the axes come
alive just at the moment.
But having that ongoing help you understand the relationship of the global coordinates AIs Z being up
if we actually hopped on over into edit mode here we can see that a Y is currently up for this bone
itself and that can be a bit confusing at first.
So having the actual axes turned on will help massively especially when we come to constraining movements
but more on that later.
So in the Properties window next to the armature properties of a bone properties the bone itself where
we want to name that bone.
At the moment there's only one in the scene so it's pretty obvious which bone we're referring to but
if we were to call that bone cube because that's the bone it's for it's very apparent then what that
bone is designed to do.
So if it was part of a human you might call it foote's Finger.
Leg arm torso whatever head neck et cetera.
So now we've named it how do we link these two things together.
Well we want the armature itself to be the parent of the cube or more specifically that bone with in
the arm chair to be a parent of that cube.
There are a couple of ways of doing that but the easiest way is to select your child.
So I'm going to hop back onto object mode select the child which is the cue hold down Shift and select
the parents.
Now you can get it through the object menu as well.
Let's go to parenting.
Or I like their shortcut keys control.
MP for parents oh got a load of options here but we want to set it as a bone.
There we go.
We've got it set as a bone and we notice over in the outliner there the cube doesn't exist anymore.
In fact if we open it up we can see it's now a child of the armature.
Exactly we want what we want it to be.
And if we actually go into the Cube property self under the object properties if we scroll down a little
we can see the parent is the arm chair and the bone.
It's linked to is the cube bone.
Very useful.
One final thing on bones.
Depending on the type of mesh you're dealing with we're going to be dealing with a a rigid mesh are
our lamp isn't going to be a bendy floppy lamp.
It's actually going to have arms that are rigid and do not flex.
They just move.
So we select the bone again itself and have a look at the properties here.
You will actually want to turn off the option deform.
Otherwise when we try and move things later on you will actually distort our geometry rather than just
move it.
So it likely to unstick that for every bone that we're going to put into our lamp going forward.
Okay guys it's Challenge time.
I'd like you to add an armature to the lamp.
So at an armature to our lamp and make sure the armature is located at 0 0 0 so right in the centre
of our scene to centre the 3D cursor before you add it that's the easiest way of doing it.
Call the armature lamp rake.
That's essentially what it will be coming afterwards.
Name the single bone that's generated stem.
And then finally make that bone the parent of the stem mesh that we've already got my little cylinder
coming out the base.
Okay.
Pause a video now and give that a go.
Okay guys welcome back.
Let's hop back on over into blender.
Right now we're in our animated lamp which need to find the 3-d cursor first wars over there it's taking
a break.
So I'm going to you shift and see to recenter it.
And then I'm going to press the number pad full stop.
So it seems straight back in.
Right now that we've re centred that we can go ahead and add armature.
So we're in object mode yet again had an arm a single bone.
Exxon So that's a bit large.
So at this point I'm going to scale it down.
It's much like any other objects as we've already discussed.
So we've got the operator panel over here add armature.
If I reduce the radius and it seems to be shrinking I'm going to set it so well there will do for the
moment we can always alter it all later.
And let's turn on x ray so I can see where it's sitting X and that's exactly where I want it to be so
it's position is now right let's call it lamp reyk because that is what it's going to become.
And lamp rake.
Excellent.
Now we've got the lamp rig named.
We've got the one bone in there and we need to name that bones so with the bone selected that's good.
We can go in here and nain the bone stem.
I mean the the stem the child of the arm chair itself.
Brilliant.
Now the order in which you select these does matter and then control empy and set it to the bone.
There we go.
So finally let's just make sure we're not deforming So we're not deforming to we can unstick that in
the bone properties.
Your name stem there.
I'm going to name this here lamp rig.
So in all we were talking about Essence I think there's everything done.
Excellent.
How did you guys get on.
Please share in the discussions and I'll see you in the next lecture.