Posing an armature
Like the objects we animated in previous chapters, the bones in an armature all have location, rotation, and scale properties. Transforming one or more bones directly is called posing, the first step in character animation. Together, the given positions of the bones in an armature at a single point in time are referred to as a pose. As we animate Rain in later chapters, we’ll put her in one pose, key the properties of those bones we just posed, then move on to the next pose at another frame, key the properties for those bones, and so on.
That’s character animation. It’s not all that different from animating objects! This time though, our objects are bones, there are hundreds of them, and they’re connected in a complex system that may not seem intuitive at first. Easy, right? Maybe not. Before animating Rain, we’d better spend a section or two just on how to pose her.
Our first exercise will take Rain from a T pose to an idle...
