Fox Biped and Weighting

In order to animate my Fox - I will need to add a biped the to the model, along with suiatble weighting of the joints to get a realistic movement effect.

I started off by creating a new biped through.. Create > Systems > Biped. Then rotating the skeleton to a horizontal position. Next using "Figure Mode" in the motion rollout, I positioned the arms and legs to fit inside the model.

*Hot Tip - freezing the model prevents accidental movement when attempting to align the Biped and prevent the model from being selected.

This is a fairly simple process and can be done in a short space of time if done correctly.

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Weighting

The fox model required fairly extensive weighting to simulate clean movement of the joints. What makes this type of model particularly difficult to skin properly is the fact that mistakes can easily be seen through small movements and the structure of the skeleton affects a large number of smaller section of each leg.

Testing consistently after small sections were weighted was the best approach to this task - eventually I was able to weight the model to a standard that allows the model to look very realistic with the right use of lighting.

The fact that I needed to keep going back over the skinning process to correct errors has allowed me to become quite proficient using the weight tool and blending the vertices.