Rigging

One of the notable criticisms of my final film was the lack of character from the musical notes. And upon this, I agree. The entire project relied on manual movement, scaling and rotation for the animation of the musical notes. So to start adding character to the notes, I thought a way to go is to add bones to the musical notes. This will make them much more flexible and bendy as well as squashy and stretchy.

I went back to the original file where I created the notes. And then used wireframe on the musical notes as I created bone structures. I made sure to put it in the key parts that I would be needed to be bent otherwise it would come out choppy and it would bend in the wrong area.

Before I apply the bones to the notes, I need to add a tessellate to subdivide the object, which will give it a higher polygon count. This will ensure that the objects will flex around the joint area needed and not anywhere that it doesn't need to.

Then I use a skin modifier using all the necessary bones to the objects. However there was still an issue with the envelopes, which essentially highlight the effected area of skin which the bone is placed.

Now that the envelopes have been altered, the bones now flex very well around the joint areas. This should make the musical notes more flexible, thus it can add more character.