In animation, joints and bones are necessary to animate people moving, jumping or walking because humans can’t move in a convincing way without them. They are not visible within the animation. There are different types of joints in the human body such as hinge joints, ball joints and universal joints. These limit what the body is capable of, for example, knee joints are a hinge joint because they have a limited range of motion (forward and backward like a hinge), shoulders are a ball joint because they can move in multiple different ways and wrist joints are universal joints because they move up and down
I attempted rigging a model in Maya and learned how to create joints for the spine, arms, legs, and neck. Learned how to mirror joints in Maya across an axis.
Started learning to paint skin weights on a model and first bound skin to all joints so the skin could move by moving the joints.
Painting skin weights onto model can control which part and how much of the model is affected by rotating the joints. By painting skin weights, the movement of the joint can be sharper or it can affect the surrounding skin. This can make the movement more realistic because skin stretching to accommodate movement occurs in the human body.
Used a colour ramp to paint over the affected joints (black and blue being least affected, red and white being most affected). This makes the shoulder and arm move while slightly affecting the underarm to make the movement more believable.
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