Modeling humans is something that I’ve done before (see Istanbul). But a model by itself does not contain any information about how the mesh will react when animated. Each movement has a corresponding counter action (ie, a model’s center of gravity must change when picking up a heavy object) and often involves more then one muscle.

In Istanbul, the structure of bones (or armatures) in the characters did not use a system called IK kinetics to control the structure of the bones. Instead, each bone was rotated separately and manually like moving a wireframe model. IK kinetics stets up a set of rules for the software that will automatically move the bones near the one moved manually in a realistic (and user defined) manner, making the mesh behave much more like a puppet.

A perfect example of where this is useful is the (almost infamous) scene in Istanbul where a character reaches for an orange. Instead of simply moving the hand and letting the rest of the arm deform itself realistically, I animated it by manually moving each part of the mesh until it looked realistic enough. Of course, it did not look realistic enough.

So, the protagonist in my next movie is fully set up by IK kinetics. Here are some early versions of the character with a disjointed head and stubs for arms, very much borrowing elements from ancient Cycladic statues.

I began by creating the bone structure and modifying it outward into the fingers like so. There are no IK kinetics here.

Once the structure is complete, adding the IK kinetics allows for better control over the mesh, and I maneuvered the statue into a sitting position and moved the hands onto the knees.

And here is a frame from the final render showing the stature complete and expressing loneliness.

Since the style is very similar to that of Cycladic statures and figurines, and since the characters have no facial features other then an elongated nose, all the emotional elements must be communicated by body movements. It is interesting how much faith we put on body language, something that has been lacking in my previous films.