Pixelmon Mod

Recently Gilbert put on here a tutorial oh how to make models. So here is one for the rigging part in animation. For this I am using Blender. Blender is a free open source program that allows you to do loads of things relating to 3D modeling, renders and animation. It is in 2 videos 1 being the skeleton and the second being the weight painting. These terms are explained in the videos.

Please leave comments here or on the videos if you want any more help, advice or clarification and I will do my best to help you with your issue.

Part 1 (Making the skeleton)



Part 2 (Weight painting)

This is really the best tutorials i have ever seen for rigging and weight painting, and I understood it really quickly. But I got 2 questions:

Do models have to be one mesh or not? Cause I had a comment saying they had to be one mesh on one of my models but here you are showing a model with more than one mesh.

When will the animation tutorial be out? Can't wait!

Yeah that comment was probably me. They do not need to be one mesh but not being one mesh makes significant problems in animation. Two of the problems are clipping / cleaving and non natural deformation. Clipping is when one part of the body intersects another. When you have a model in more then one mesh if this is taken as the arm lets say the arm is clipped into the body when the model is made. Then when the arm is moved in animation after it has been rigged as it moves different parts of the model move in an out of view. Cleaving is caused by the same thing but when it isn't embed deep enough part of the mesh comes out so the hollow inner bit can be seen. If you look very closely to the cleffa in game you will notice this. Non natural movement is essentially when you move the arm none of the body is affected. When you move your arm in reality it causes deformation to your torso however if the arm and torso are not one mesh this won't happen and it will look weird. Its also a tone nicer to weight paint. Anyway that is the reasons we ask where possible to make models in one mesh.

ah I understand, also, is there a way you can make multiple meshes turn into one mesh very easily?

Yes but it is not very nice and makes awkward geometry, but here is how.

First split your mesh into separate objects. In blender this can be done by going to mesh edit mode, selecting all the vertices and then pressing the "P" key. Then chose the "By loose parts option". Next go into object mode and select one of the objects. Go to the properties window and navigate to the modifiers tab (the spanner). Chose add modifier and select boolean (under generate subsection). Change the operation to union and then in the object list chose one of the other meshes that intersect. Then click apply. A new object will be created with those two objects fused. You can then manually remove the starting meshes. The geometry may need to be cleaned up after this however.

Ooo that's really helpful, before I use to use the knife tool to make intersect able vertices. It was a waste of time. Thank you for showing me this other method

It can be very helpful but will in 99% of cases require the vertices to be slightly moved as there will be many very small faces around the joint that are not exactly wanted.