Using separate bone chains for different tasks
A useful approach when building rigs is to create more than one bone chain to accomplish different tasks. The idea behind this is to not overwhelm you with so many functions attached to one single bone, making the rig easier to understand and modify.
It is useful to separate the bone chains by their main functions to make things easier to manage: one chain that will only deform your character's mesh, one for creating Inverse Kinematics (IK) controllers, another for Forward Kinematics (FK) controllers, interface, helpers, and so on.
By creating them separately, you can make changes without breaking things in your rig. If you stack all the functions and constraints on one single chain, a little change ...
Get Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
