They are a great technique to animate limbs and anything that work as a limb such as a mechanical arm. The objective is to use the bones system to create as many bones as joints are needed. Then use the HK solvers to make the movement of all the bones similar to a limb. Without the HK solver the bones could also be animated but it will take much more time because what the IK solver do is to tell all the limbs to move accordingly with the bone the user selected and animated.
Skinning
In this skinning tutorial I learnt how to attach a bone system to a mesh in order to animate the mesh. Once the bone is attached to the mesh (a cylinder this time but it could be an arm or a leg from a character for example), when I animate the bone the mesh follows all the bone's movements. I did not sue this technique for my assignment animation but I found it extremely useful for character animation, which I plan to work on at some point.
This is how I attached the bones to the mesh:
This is what happens when I animate the bone. As you can see, when the cylinder bends there is a big gap where the "joint" would be.
And after moving some vertices this is how it looks like. Not perfect but at least the gap is gone.
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