[Thomas]

Seventh part: "Setup"

If all the steps were done without any problem, your character should be ready to animate. But if you start to animate it, you may have several problems: two manipulators for each hand or foot, it's hard to select the pelvis bone, etc. Then, it's time to create assistants or "manipulators" to make easier the animation process.

In the vertex modeler, create a kind of full hand (1), do two internal extrusions (2&3) and remove the internal polygon (4). You can tweak some polygons to have something nicer.

Go back to the Assembly room and set the hot point of this kind of hand on a par with the wrist and select the bone of the wrist and the simplified hand (in this order). Go to Edit>Align function, select each axis in the dialog box and validate. You should have your simplified hand aligned to the hot point of the wrist bone. Now, select the simplified hand and with the rotate tool, align it with the bones of the hand.

Now, in the scene tree, select the IK chain of the wrist (1) and drop it to the simplified hand. Do it again with the hand IK chain (1): you have created a new hierarchy (2), where the simplified hand is the parent of the two IK chains!

Below, an animation of the hand manipulator and the IK chains manipulators. Moving the hand manipulator moves the two IK manipulators, but because of the hierarchy and IK, you can move each IK chain independently! Try it and you will love it!

Do it again for the other hand and the feet. Don't forget to adjust the hot point of the modeled manipulators, to be sure that rotations of the manipulators will fit the bones rotations!

Do another big manipulator, a kind of empty circle for the pelvis. Drag the pelvis bone hierarchy (in fact, all the character hierarchy) other the manipulator in the scene tree (1), to create a hierarchy as made previously for the simplified hands (2)..

For this manipulator, apply a visible shader color (1) (like the green in the screenshot), put the alpha channel value to 0 (2) (not visible in the renders) and in the property panel, uncheck the Casts Shadows and Receive shadows boxes (3).

Now, it's time to animate! Bellow some tests made in a couple of seconds, with the help of the manipulators!

This tutorial is now done. As you see it, it's a long run for a full character skinning, rigging and setup, but when it's done, how easy it becomes to animate! Now, it's time for you to apply this on all character you will create!