Blender For Dummies, 4th Edition

Chapter 12

Rigging: The Art of Building an Animatable Puppet

IN THIS CHAPTER

Making shape keys

Taking advantage of hooks

Working with armatures to control characters

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 Chapter 11. I mean, you can move the whole character mesh as a unit from one location to another, but you can’t make the character smile or wiggle her toes or even bend her 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 make the life of an animator monumentally easier. Think about it like turning your 3D mesh into a remote-control puppet. This chapter explains the ...