8. Fundamentals of Rigging

What is Rigging?

Rigging is the art of preparing something for movement. What the skeleton and muscles are to the human body or the engine and wheels are to a car, so rigging is to 3D graphics. Therefore it’s an extremely important part of the animation pipeline. And like a car engine and a human skeleton, rigging is a very technical skillset that can get complex. But this course is designed to ease you into the subject, so we’re just focusing on the fundamentals. And there’s 2 methods of rigging with Blender that we’re going to cover:

Mechanical Rigging

Mechanical rigging focuses on object-to-object relationships and constraints, similar to machinery in a car engine or other mechanizations. Chris Kuhn is one of the best mechanical riggers in the Blender community and he’s your instructor for this first chapter. NOTE: Chris' advanced helicopter rig is available on Blendswap.

Character Rigging

As you can imagine, character rigging is focused on characters. This is very much the digital equivalent of skeletons moving a body, whether human or creature. It centers around a unique object type in Blender, called an armature.

This armature is primarily used to deform a model organically.

NOTE: An advanced Baker Rig is available to download as a CG Cookie Resource. 

WHAT'S INCLUDED IN THIS COURSE

Chapter 1: Mechanical Rigging
Mechanical rigging is useful for general mechanization and automations. It's based on object-to-object relationships and constraints. Guest instructor, Chris Kuhn, teaches this chapter.

* Object Origin Points
* Parenting & Inherited Properties
* Empty Objects
* Objects Constraints: Limit & Copy
* Object Constraints: Tracking
* Object Constraints: Transformation
* Rig Hierarchies

Chapter 2: Character Rigging
This kind of rigging centers around the Armature object type, which is used to deform mesh models based on a skeletal system.

* Intro to Character Rigging
* Armature Properties
* Armature Edit Mode
* Parenting Mesh to Armature
* Weight Painting
* Rigging & Modifier Stack
* Bone Constraints: Inverse Kinematics (IK)
* Custom Control Shapes
* Rigify Overview

Licensing: You're free to use this resource in up to three classrooms and of course for yourself!