Text Animation

This is my first post and I’m not sure if this is an animation question or a modeling question so if I need to post somewhere else please let me know.

What I have is a text 8 turned mesh with bones applied as though I was animating a bouncing ball. The rig is the same one from David Ward’s tutorial used on blendercookie.com. The only thing I changed about the rig is I subdivided the center bone and increased the bottom center bone’s segments to 32. Everything seems to work how I would like it except when I rotate the center bone to a certain degree- the bottom half of the eight “crinkles”. I was hoping I could just up the segments of the bottom bone to the point where the crinkle would sort of smooth out, but the highest amount is 32. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

I have attached a copy of the blendfile (2.55) and a screen shot.

Attachments


eight.blend (564 KB)

The front surfaces of your eight are triangles. You need to quad-ify them (I don’t think that’s a word, btw). You need to delete the surfaces of your eight, then match up the vertices to make quads. This tutorial might help: http://niuarts.squarespace.com/blog-design/2010/10/16/quick-tutorial.html

That seems like what I’m looking for. Thank you very much!