Learning Blender, 3rd Edition

11

Character Rigging

Rigging is probably the most technical and complex part of the character-creation process. Your character exists already and has a shape, but it’s static: It needs a skeleton that moves and deforms the 3D mesh properly so that you can pose it, animate it, and bring it to life. In this chapter, you learn the basics of creating skeletons, rigging them (which means setting your skeleton up so that it works as expected and can be used intuitively and comfortably), and skinning a 3D mesh (which is the process that defines how the skeleton deform a mesh). After learning the basics, you’ll use Rigify, an add-on bundled with Blender that allows you to automate the creation of a fully rigged skeleton for your characters. You also ...