...skeletons in the computer

Oh dear how confusing.

Well, almost. Creating joint systems - This was so good! Take your polygon 'thing' and just click where you want it to bend, it's that simple. Obviously, there's a bit more to it than that but for basics it's pretty straightforward - the rest is more about tweaking to improve movement rather than create it.

For this, we took the hand model created previously and added a joint rig so we could animate it wiggling about. Basically, the first joint is the wrist so you click there. From this, you work up each finger bone as is in a real hand, clicking at each knuckle to create a moveable joint.

Once the whole joint rig is created the rig has to be bound to the mesh so that when the rig moves, the mesh reacts with it. Again, this is pretty straightforward - it's just a matter of selecting the two parts and clicking the 'bind' tool in the relevant drop down menu (again, obviously there are more advanced options but shush)

BUT... that's where simple ends...

Hello Painting Weight, how I do not love you! Painting weights, I still don't understand and really need to sit down and practice with a textbook alongside. I think that the main principle is to distribute the amount of distortion placed upon the different areas of a bending joint. Further than this, I have no idea :(

However, once the joint system is in place, animating seems simple. It's no different from animating any of the downloaded characters I've been playing around with... you move a bit, key frame, move a bit, key frame... This part I get :P

Now, back to painting weights >_<