SOFT WARE: BLENDER

Charlie Stanford, Melbourne

Human Base Meshes v1.1 by Blender Studio and community contributions provide the perfect starting point for creating armatures

© CC0

Paul Hatton replies

Making bones in Blender is a simple task and requires little technical knowledge. That being said, having a solid understanding of how bone chains work, especially in humans, will stand you in good stead for creating realistic and believable movements. In answer to this question, we won’t cover the latter, but a simple Google or YouTube search will help you understand this more.

You would be forgiven for thinking the creation of bone structures is only applicable to animated characters, but that’s only one small application. In reality, anything that you want to animate could benefit from this type of structure. A robot is a great example, and I don’t just mean a human-like character; I mean any machine that has moving parts. Animating individual parts of a moving machine is tiring and laborious, especially if each part has an impact on the location and rotation of the other parts. This becomes infinitely easier with bones.