Milkshape3D Tutorial 1.3

3.3 - Creating a skeleton:

To make our model usable by Genesis3D and to add animations, we have to create a skeleton inside the 'Skeleton'-register:

Before creating the first bone, we change the view inside the 3D-window from 'Textured' to 'Wireframe' to get the best control of the bones' positions. Now click 'New' in the 'Bones'-section, a green dot will appear inside each window:

'Move' it to the position in the middle of the model, it will be our starting point. 'Rename' to 'hip'. Now click 'New' again and move the next dot to the left, in the middle of the leg:

As you see, you just created the first 'bone', rename it to hipright. Now choose 'hip' again in the bones-selection-field to make it parent again. Create a new one to the other side and rename to hipleft. From there create toplegleft, botlegleft and footleft like this:

Now choose 'hipright' in the selection and repeat that for the other leg, renaming to toplegright, botlegright and footright. This done choose hip again and create a new bone that stretches up to the middle of the arms, rename to 'chest'. Create 'chestleft' and 'chestright' like this:

After that create toparmleft, botarmleft, handleft and toparmright, botarmright and handright. Finally back to 'chest' and the last bones neck and head. After hiding the groups and switching off the grid you should have a skeleton like this:

The next part is a bit tricky, we have to assign all vertexes of the model to the bones. It doesn't matter if all bones are mentioned by that, very important is that ALL! vertexes are assigned to any bone. Concerning that Milkshape3D supports us with two helpful buttons too. But first we have to think about the areas of the model that later should be animated, and to which bone this area should belong. We start with a foot that you should mark after changing the select-method to vertex:

Now choose the desired bone, 'footleft' in my case, and click 'Assign'. By that we assigned the foot-area to the bone footleft and are able to animate it later using this bone. Now you may create more areas and assign to bones near them. If you later dislike a selection, 'Clear' it to do a new one. To not to lose the overview which vertexes are still assigned and which are not, you may show all assigned, resp. all not assigned by clicking 'SelAssigned' or 'SelUnassigned'. Like mentioned above, all vertexes must be assigned to at least one bone. A bit exhausting but effective later.

Allright, now you could export the model as *.act-file and view it inside the Actor Viewer of Genesis3D. The next chapter will explain how animate it.