Now as you see, Dragon bones is a great animation tool. But if you animate these puppet like animations, they tend to be a bit rigid. You can move the parts around, but everything seems like a rigid body, which is not very good for your animation because it's not making it very alive. Look at this animation is walking, walking and everything is very, very nice, but we're doing it. Now here comes mesh editing in the picture. A mesh is a network of wealth taxes, you can use to edit and freeform deform your animation.

A mesh is deforming your artwork, and you can animate it. So the formation is following your animation. It's making it more alive. You can add it here you can edit cloth or off in this case, you can edit the feather of this little guy. I right click, and I make it a mesh. And here, you see it's already said it now it's a mesh, I can edit the mesh.

I will talk about that later. And that's it. Now a mesh is all at the Edit table in the animation part. This is a simple mesh with just four points, I can move these points and it is changing shape. It's not changing change shape in the armature mode changing shape in the animation mode. So if I add a keyframe here, and I move the mesh a bit, and then I add another keyframe, and I will move the mesh also there.

Let's see here. Yeah. Let's see it's already has some movement. I already have some animation. I already have some things going on. It seems that it's alive and he's breathing.

But it's not the best. What I want. I want to use these bones and animate these bones. So Delete this animation now. And from my basic mesh, I create a more complex one. I will draw this mesh by hand, I zoom in.

So as this is already mentioned, I can deform it and I can move it. Now I click on Edit Mesh. This little window is appearing on the bottom. And as you see it already has a line in it which is breaking my mesh into two triangles. I could edit these triangles, I could add these polygons. And by I'll do new nodes and remove nodes.

These are called vertexes. I can move them around and I can shape them. Now. I use this to create a new yes confirm. It went back to its basic form and now by hand, I will instead of the square throw a shape we is much more close to my original art. Just throw as much dots as you need.

Just click click click I zoom in. As you see it's snapping a bit. I pan with the right click a bit. So I see what I'm doing and I'm just adding nodes. Now, I said by setting the bones that keep it simple to keep yourself sane and very cleanly, here with the vertices, you can add as much as you want. It really depends on the strength of your computer, but it's also the more you add, the more fluid the animation will be the more fluid the movement and the shape deformation will be And here on the end, the little circle appears.

So it's closing. And Tara, I have my mesh, it looks like a little warm, you see automatically it created these triangles, it created these polygons between the nodes. But I want more. I want the mesh to be fully editable, because now this might be flat color. But there could be that there is a pattern in it. There is if it's a hair, it can be highlight.

It can be a color gradient, etc, etc. and everything inside the mesh, everything is deforming. So if it's a pattern, it will deform as well. Now this is just a basic one, so it's flat color. But we are adding other nodes as well inside. So I just click and it's adding new nodes as you see it's on the fly.

Really shaping the redrawing the vertexes and the polygons. Okay. Now with these two, I can with the pencil, I can move them I can edit them, I can delete as well but with this one I can edit and move them a bit. What I want is to arrange them nicely in an even better. Okay, I can shape them a bit. Nice.

Let's go see it in animation. So it's already visible here in the animation if I move with the steering it Let's select the bones and animate the feather. Now just rigidly because I just want to set the basic ball movement and I want to set the basic animation. So if it's in the down position, I want the feather to pop up a bit if it's in the upper position I wanted to pop down, because if the characters body and head is going up and down, up and down, up and down, but every movement then the feather will go up and down. So I select just the basic keyframes, you can add much more later as we did with the walk cycle animation. And now I say on the top of the walk and on the bottom of the walk, I just move the feather a bit.

I don't need this keyframe. Okay, so just a basic one. Here I wanted to move a bit because the character moved up I want the feather to move a bit down. So I have the basic movements. But obviously that's not what I want. I know the feather will go up and down but I wanted to wave.

How I do that is that I do one very important part is binding the bonds. So, I select this and select which bones to bind, I push Ctrl B so all the bones are visible and obviously, binding means plain English is to bind the bones to the mesh so If this bone is moving, then this mesh will move. For example, I'm biting now the feather bones to the feather, obviously, and not the leg bones, I don't care if the leg is moving, I don't care if the feather is moving or not. So these bones view are responsible to moving this mesh. So why bind them? I simply select the bones, one after each other.

This, this and this. Notice they were they appeared on the right and they have different colors. If I would add, I don't know 25 different bowls. They would be 25 different colors in the same line. For a new mash, it will always start from the same basic color green, orange, red, blue, it's using different colors so you can easily differentiate. There was already a little jump there, which means it's already binding.

As you see I'm moved the little Bone before and the animation is already fluid, it's already different. So let's make it even more flexible. Let's animate the middle bone or the basic a bit more. And it's already so nice and flexible. It's like a little whip and now the end one so it's really whipping around. I just select the bones and I move them and animate them as I did with the Walker.

Cycle and this time the federal will not just bounce up and down rigidly, but I'm adding keyframe in the points and as you see, I bend over and I exaggerate. I bend it over, bend it down. And as you see the shape is changing. It might seem strange at one point, like what I drew is changing shape. But I can really exaggerate and play with it. And see it's already nice and fluffy.

It's really looking like cotton candy like a real feather, and it gives so much power to the walk of my little Knight. Now in the walk cycle, I have much more much more keyframes. And this time, I just want to keep it simple, but you should and you can add more keyframes and play more with the mesh animation of the feather. Imagine if it's a hair or a wing or something for your character. It could be amazing. exaggerate and play with it.

It's looking nicely I reshaped To be okay, it's bumping nicely and looking nicely. In the next lesson. We will practice the mesh animation a bit more