Doc:Tutorials/Animation/BSoD/Character Animation/Torso legs and feet

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[edit] Creating the torso

The bulk of the torso is very easy - it's just a couple of extrudes. The trick is to shape it later on to give it some mass, so it doesn't look like a square chunk.

Extruding the torso.

Extrude the lower edge loop several times to form the torso. Here, I've extruded three times (Extruding the torso).

Making room for the legs 1.

Now we have to make room for the legs. It gets tricky to explain, just follow the images:

Extrude the front-most edge and the back-most edge once (Making room for the legs 1).

Making room for the legs 2.

Extrude the remaining vertices in the original loop once - including one of the vertices you just extruded from (Making room for the legs 2).

Making room for the legs 3.

Extrude the front-most and back-most edges once more (Making room for the legs 3).

Making room for the legs 4.

Connect the newly extruded edge loops with faces - one in the front (Making room for the legs 4) and one in the back. If you get a message saying "Error: The selected vertices form a concave quad", try moving the vertices around a little, and see this page for why it happened: BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation/Concave quads

[edit] Shaping the torso

Before shaping the torso - looks like a block of cheese!

Now it's time to shape the torso. Remember to move the view around a lot, use perspective view and ortho view (NumPad 5, and use proportional editing (O). Here's what my character looked like before shaping:

After shaping the torso - maybe cheesy, but not like a block . . .

And after a few mins of shaping . . . which involved about 150 vertex moves with
RMB -G- LMB .

It takes time!

Shaping the mesh takes a long time. It takes a lot of practice to figure out which views work best, when to use proporional editing (or when to turn it off), and how far to move vertices. The more time you spend on it, the better you'll get and the faster it will go next time.

[edit] Extruding the legs

We have to close off the bottom of the torso before extruding the legs.

Closing off the bottom of the torso.

Make a face connecting the front and back, as in Closing off the bottom of the torso.

Loop cutting the bottom of the torso.

Loop-cut (Ctrl R the new face, as in Loop cutting the bottom of the torso.

Shaping the root of the leg.

Now shape the root of the leg so it's a little more circular (Shaping the root of the leg).

Extruding the legs is pretty straightforward. Making the feet is a little different from the hands - mostly because of the 90 degree angle the feet make with the legs.

Extruding the leg 1.

Extrude the vertex ring at the root of the leg, and shape it so the vertices are more or less on the same plane (Extruding the leg 1).

Extruding the leg 2.

Extrude the legs some more. Make sure you have three edge loops close together for the knees so that the leg will bend better when animating (Extruding the leg 2).

Shaping the legs.

Spend some time to shape the legs (Shaping the legs).

Problems with fused vertices when shaping

When shaping the legs, you might run into a problem like this, where the vertex you're moving suddenly snaps to the plane of the mirror:

Fused vertices.

This happens because Do Clipping is enabled. The vertex I was moving in this case got too close to the mirror plane, so Do Clipping thought it should be snapped to the plane. There are two ways to fix this:

Turn off Do Clipping, move the vertex where you want it to go, then turn Do Clipping back on again.
Keep Do Clipping on, but decrease the Merge Limit value. This value determines how close a vertex can get to the mirror plane before being snapped to it. If this value is zero, the vertex has to be right on the plane for it to be snapped.

Mirror modifier panel.

We've got legs! Here is the character so far:

The character so far.

[edit] Creating the feet

Extruding the feet 1.

Select the three front vertices by the ankle and extrude them. Extruding the feet 1 shows the extrusion from an oblique view, but it's probably easiest to do the extrusion in side view (NumPad 3).

Extruding the feet 2.

Extruding the feet 3.

Keep extruding the three vertices as in Extruding the feet 2 and Extruding the feet 3. Note, in Extruding the feet 3, I've extruded the vertices along the sole of the foot so that they more or less line up with the vertices on the top of the foot where it meets the ankle (you may have to click on the image to get a larger view).

Now start filling in faces on the feet by selecting four vertices at a time and hitting F to make a face. The sequence of 6 images below shows this process.

Faces on the feet 1.

Faces on the feet 2.

Faces on the feet 3.

Faces on the feet 4.

Faces on the feet 5.

Faces on the feet 6.

Forming the heel 1.

Forming the heel 2.

Extrude vertices from the sole back to make the heel (Forming the heel 1 and Forming the heel 2). Each extrude should line up with vertices in the leg, because we're going to make faces using these extruded vertices.

Forming the heel 3.

Make faces with F to fill in the heel. Note that there's a single triangle Forming the heel 3 - there weren't an even number of edge loops on the legs. That's OK, if it ends up being a problem later in animation we can fix it.

Now add edge loops to make sufficient vertices to shape the foot.

Sole edge loop.

Ctrl R to make an edge loop near the sole of the foot (Sole edge loop]]).

Middle foot edge loop.

Ctrl R to make an edge loop around the middle of the foot (Middle foot edge loop). These edge loops will give the foot better shape.

Ankle edge loop.

Ctrl R to make an edge loop around the ankle. This will allow the transition from the lower leg to the foot to be a little sharper.

Shaping the foot . . . you can of course shape however you want. You're probably beginning to develop your own style of shaping, these images are just the way I did it for this character.