Animating with Blender

The Armature Modifier and Vertex Groups

The latest release of Blender has a greatly enhanced algorithm for generating vertex groups from bones called Heat Weighting. Before you actually attach the armature to the character, it is worth ensuring once again that both your character meshes and your armature have neither rotations nor scaling with Ctrl-A. Then, with the character model selected, add an Armature modifier from the Modifiers panel. Enter the name of the control armature in the Ob: field.

Note

There are a few shortcuts for entering names into fields like this. You can begin typing the name and press the Tab key to have Blender attempt to automatically complete it. Also, you can hover the mouse over the armature’s name field in either ...