Yeah, I thought I was done with the Mannequin too. Well really I am as far as the modeling goes. There’s just one more thing that has to be done before it is ready to be rigged.
I need to put it is a particular type of pose. It’s called a T-pose. It’s basically what it sounds like. It looks like a T. This with the arms stretched out to the sides away from the body. It’s not a tricky pose really. I imagine some of the other poses I will be attempting will be much more difficult.
To get the mannequin in the T-pose I first had to figure out if I wanted the shoulder included in the rotation or not. I decided not but that the pivot point needed to be at the shoulder. So I grouped the parts of each arm into their own group. For the right arm I created a group of the hand, wrist, forearm, elbow, and upper arm. Then for the left arm I created a group for the same on the left side. Then I selected one of the groups and under the hierarchy menu I used the affect pivot only and I moved the pivot to about the shoulder. Then I turned off the affect pivot and tested it. I was able to use the rotate gizmo
and rotate the arm straight out. Yay! So I did the same thing on the other group.
Now we have a mannequin in T-pose.
It’s going to be a while before you get to see any poses or animation. My next task for this part is to figure out exactly how to rig this character. I will be spending a lot of time reviewing tutorials and tinkering with the bone tools to get things just right. Before I get too far, I know I will need to freeze the transforms so that if I get things messed up it will be easy to get back to this pose. I hope I remember to do that before I start.
Don’t worry. There is plenty more modeling to do on this project besides this Mannequin.