I'm a beginner with using blender but thought some of these tips might be helpful. Basically i just wanted to skin a plane in blender.
Some new topics coming from a Maya background is the use of different modes pose/object/edit modes in Blender.
Here are some of the steps i did for creating this simple demo.
modeling
—-add a plane mesh, add divisions to plane - , ctrl+r in edit mode roll mouse
object properties draw all edges and wire and z to see edges in object mode
rigging
—create bone, create armature in object mode shift+a, in object mode rotate bone 90 degrees, in edit mode select end joint e extrude y to extrude along y axis. name bone using bone icon.
in object mode shift+rmb to select mesh first then armature ctrl+p to skin with automatic weights, can only see mesh moving with bone in pose mode (tried object/edit all of mesh moved in object and non mesh moved in edit)
—weight paint, red full weight/blue no weight, F to change brush size (auto normalize make weights add to 1). with mesh selected choose weight paint mode from drop down at bottom.
animation
— in pose mode with end bone selected, i to insert key frame, arrow key left right to change frames, picked animation layout for doing keyframing
render
— choose output location in render tab, OpenGL render animation (avi video output format)
Happy Sketching,
Nate
These are a couple of links i found helpful for this doodle demo
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Bones
Grant Abbit's weight paint tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl4qTgwQwYw
