Going Further - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 251

Figure 15-7: Alternate renders of the Spider Bot, with different
lighting and camera angles

storing, the different properties and positions of
these elements through time.
Rigging requires adding an armature object
to your scene and editing it to create a “skeleton” for
your model. Next, you must bind your model to the
armature, either by parenting the model's objects to
specific bones or, preferably, by using the Armature
modifier to assign different vertex groups within
objects to the different bones of the armature.
Once you've completed these steps, you can switch
to Pose mode with the armature selected to begin
moving and posing your model (see Figure 15-8).
In addition to creating bones to directly control
parts of your model, you can also create constraints
and helper bones to form a kind of user interface
for your rig. These could include controls to make
sure that limbs reach for a specific point automati-
cally or controls to make the model perform certain
actions. For example, in Figure 15-8, the bones
shown highlighted in yellow and green are those
that have had constraints applied to make posing
the legs easier. This is a complex process, though.
To learn more about rigging, look at the resources
available from the Blender Foundation Shop and on
the Blender wiki.

Figure 15-6: The finished clouds composited into my scene

Different Looks
Another way to get more out of a project is to con-
sider some different looks for your final renders.
This might involve finding new camera angles or
trying different lighting schemes. I experimented
with some different looks for lighting the Spider
Bot, as well as different camera angles, as shown in
Figure 15-7.

Rigging and Animation
Of course, the most dramatic way to take your proj-
ects further is to animate them. One simple way to
animate a scene is to render a turntable by rotating
the camera around the subject and keying its posi-
tion and rotation as it moves in a circle. Another way
is to render a fly-through, with your camera moving
around the scene to show different points of inter-
est. More complex animation—for example, animat-
ing your character's movements—involves creating
rigs for any moving elements and then keying, or