Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook

Chapter 1. Get Rigging

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Defining good orientations for your bones
• Using separate bone chains for different tasks
• Customizing shapes and colors for your bones
• Using corrective shape keys
• Making an IK-FK switcher
• Tips on weight painting you characters

Introduction

So, you've successfully modeled an awesome character in Blender. After hours of careful and detailed work you have built a very appealing protagonist with a good topology for your next animation, but there's an issue: how do we make it look more life like, and also, how do we make it move?

Since a character model can be made of thousands of vertices, moving them individually across the 3D space is virtually impossible. We need an easier way of ...