Blender All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 3

Rigging: The Art of Building an Animatable Puppet

IN THIS CHAPTER

Making shape keys

Taking advantage of hooks

Working with armatures to control characters

Creating a pose library for a character

When it comes to character animation, a character is often a single seamless mesh. As a single seamless mesh, it’s virtually impossible to animate that character with any detailed movement using the object animation techniques in Book 4, Chapter 1. I mean, you can move the whole character mesh as a unit from one location to another, but you can’t make characters smile or wiggle their toes or even bend their arms. You can break the mesh apart and use a complex set of parenting and constraints, but then you lose its nice seamlessness.

What you really want to do is find ways to animate specific parts of the mesh in a controlled manner without tearing the mesh apart. To do so, you need to create a rig for your character. A rig is an underlying structure for your mesh that allows you to control how it moves. Rigs are an integral part of modern computer animation, and if done well, they ...