Rigging: Digital Orthopedia - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 243

Chapter 9
Rigging: Digital Orthopedia
Before you can animate your character (or anything else that changes shape as it moves), you need to rig
it. Rigging is the process of creating and binding a control structure for your model. In Blender, rigs are
usually created as an object called an Armature , which consists of Bones .
I'm not going to lie. I despise rigging, and need to get this off my chest. When I'm knee deep in building
a hand rig, selecting this bone from the maze of existing ones and making sure it lines up with that one
just so only to find that the constraint is preventing the whole thing from working for the tenth time,
well, it's enough to make me want throw my computer through the window and run screaming into the
forest to spend the rest of my mortal years with the raccoons and groundhogs.
But that's not going to happen to you. Honest.
Some people are into it. The process is kind of like a puzzle, and the fact is that rigging (creating the
control structure) and skinning (binding that structure to your model) is probably the singlemost difficult
thing you'll have to do in 3D. Before we get into actually creating a rig for our character, let's think for
a moment about what we want in an animation control structure.
An animated character is really a poseable digital puppet. Controls should be obvious, fairly simple, and
able to quickly produce poses that mimic (but often exceed) real-world positions. Controls should provide
useful shortcuts to the animator (e.g., finger curling), but allow freedom to deviate when necessary.
Preparing to Rig
Not every model is in a suitable state for rigging and skinning. The process works most reliably when the
different objects that make up the model have neither scaling nor rotation transforms. Most likely, you
haven't been paying attention to this sort of thing up until now. Use the N-key panel in the 3D view to
see if any of these transforms are present on your model. Figure 9.1 shows the Properties panel with both