I have been using Blender for a while, and would like to start posing things, like people, in it. I can do this in the most limited and primitive way of moving a group of veritices, but this can soon turn in to a mess. So, I am trying to learn armatures now.
I have read the tutorials I can find, and can create a chain of bones, attach a simple mesh, and pose it. However, I can’t figure out how to create a whole skeleton to fit in a mesh. For example, I can make three joined bones that could be an arm and hand, but once that is done, I can’t resize any of the bones in the arm, or pose without using the pose edit mode (one of the tutorials says DON’T use that… use just the normal TAB mode). How do I adjust the sizes and attach different groups to other groups [i.e. two arm armatures to a chest and head armature]? I get bits and pieces of info, but nothing that really shows how to make a skeleton for, say, a human mesh.
P.S. ctrl-j joins different armatures, press tab to go into edit
mode and move the root or tip of the bones to change thier
shape. Then use ctrl-tab to go into pose mode to do the poses.
Thanks for the help.
Now, how come after I pose an armature, then hit tab to get out of pose edit, the bones go back to their first position? Pressing tab again puts them back in the pose. Continuous tabbing, and I have the leg of a rockette. Why does this happen?
You should press ctrl-TAB to get out of pose mode. Pressing TAB while in
pose mode puts you in edit mode and your model snaps to the original
setup. Remember: blue = pose mode, dark pink = edit mode,
light pink = regular object mode.
If that doesn’t work, try inserting a key for the bones before leaving posemode.