Animating with Mikoto – part 4

You can also connect triangles in Metasequoia root to root.



You will see this type of connection in many humanoid character models so that the lower half of the body can be rotated independently of the top half and vice versa.

The root-root connection is the end of the IK chain for both halves of the body and can be translated.

An example can be found in lowbody_sdef.mqo located in the Sample folder included with Mikoto.

This type of connection is only allowed once in the skeleton.

Open lowbody_sdef.mqo in Metasequoia and hide the anchor|body object and the sdef:body object.



The screenshot below shows lowbody_sdef.mqo open in Mikoto.



sdef: means spherical deformation and is a technique requiring boxes in an object named anchor to surround vertices to assign those vertices to a bone.

We don’t use that technique in this tutorial but we can learn much by studying the bone:body object in Metasequoia.

• Each triangle is single sided.
• Each triangle is assigned a material.
• Some material names end with [] - this is used when you want to designate bones as left or right as is the case with the bones in the arms and legs of bone:body. Each triangle of a left/right pair uses the same material. Note that for left/right pairing to succeed, the skeleton must have one half in the negative X axis and the other half in the positive X axis.
• The bone name in Mikoto matches the material name of the triangle and the bones of a left/right pair have [L] or [R] appended to the bone name accordingly.
• The triangles that use the leg1 material which correspond to the thigh bones are connected to the hip by a line. Therefore each leg is a separate IK chain. The same applies to the arms. 
• The root-root connection is the only joint that can be translated and would be used to translate the whole model.
• The feet triangles connect at an angle to the lower leg triangles.

If you have a humanoid character model in Metasequoia you need a skeleton to animate it in Mikoto.

To do this you can create your own by studying existing examples like lowbody_sdef.mqo or you can import a skeleton into the same Metasequoia document with your character and adapt it.


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