Starting The Main Character Animations

For the last couple of weeks I've been re-writing my collision code.  I had been unhappy with the way characters bounce off static structures.  That is now acceptable and the code is a tiny bit more efficient.  I have also got some plans for some more improvements but I've been distracted enough and need to get back to artwork.

I'm now working on adding the animations to my main character.  I did not create the 3D model but I am animating it and have had to adjust it to make it easier to animate. 

The first and I find most difficult job when starting to animate a character is weight painting.  This is allocating how much each vertex on the mesh is affected by the movement in any bone.  This needs to be right so that the body bends in the right place. 

Remember I am not an expert at any of this.  I muddle through based on various tutorials.  I recently purchased two new training DVD's for Blender which I hope will help me. 

Weight painting takes a bit of fiddling.  When you start animating bits stick out where they shouldn't and the weights for individual vertices need to be corrected.

I finished that yesterday and I've been working on the first of the animations today.  Not so much an animation as a movement.  For the purpose of animating I deal with the skeleton as three sections.  This is so that I can move the arms separately from the rest.  In XNA code I merge the sections in to one movement.  The clip I am working on at the moment moves the arms from pointing a weapon towards the ground through to pointing it at the sky.

I've done the sniper version today.

I need to get ready for dinner now so no more work on the game tonight.