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

Selecting Deformer Bones

There are a lot of bones in the rig and you need to tell Blender which ones will actually deform the meshes. By default, all of them will deform it, so let’s see what you can do to define the specific deformer bones.

On the Bone tab of the Properties Editor, you can find the Deform panel. When it’s enabled, you’ll be able to set up the envelopes (the areas of influence that surround the bones) and some other features of the bone deformations. Now, if you don’t want a particular bone to deform the mesh, then you just need to disable that option for that bone. Of course, doing it for every single bone, one by one, would be very slow, so let’s look at a fast way to do it:

1. In Edit or Pose Mode, select every bone and, with ...