Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Applying Final Touches to the Rig

There are plenty of other things you can do to improve a rig like this, but for the sake of learning, this rig is already pretty cool. One thing you can do to make it much more usable is to lock any transforms that you don’t want affecting bones. This has two functions: it prevents transforms from occurring accidentally (like scaling a bone that shouldn’t be scaled or rotating a bone that is only meant to be translated) and it helps you see what you can do with each bone.

To lock transforms, select a bone. As an example, let’s use the foot roll: it’s only supposed to rotate on a single axis because the others will make the foot look wrong, and it’s not meant to be moved or scaled. In the Properties Region of ...