Rigging and Skinning - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 142

So when the controller bone is scaled down
with the S key, the IK target is drawn toward
the hand, curling the fi nger's IK chain. Likewise,
rotating the control bone changes the loca-
tion of the IK target, which in turn makes the
fi nger rotate. To make the fi nger chain work
properly, IK locks have been placed on the
bones to prevent them from rotating along the
X-axis. When animating, all except the con-
troller bones are hidden on bone layer 16. The
controllers remain visible.

A

C

B

Binding the Rig to the Mesh

The traditional way of achieving high qual-
ity deformations for character animation in
Blender is the use of vertex groups and weight
painting. That technique is still valid and useful, but a new addition to Blender's deformation arsenal called
the Mesh Deformer has made great deformations even easier to achieve. The mother uses both the armature/
vertex group and Mesh Deformer techniques, so we'll examine both.

Figure 9.23 A close-up of the mother's hand rig. The control bones that
are visible when animating are selected

If you would like to practice the techniques in this section, a fi le called “deform_practice.blend” has been
included on the disc that accompanies this topic. It contains the character mesh of the mother, the control
armature, and the mesh deformer cage.

To Deform or Not?

Not every bone in your armature should be
used to actually deform the mesh via vertex
groups or to drive the other styles of deformers.
The Deform option on a bone's Armature
Bones panel signals to Blender whether the
bone should be used or not. In general, bones
that follow the actual structure of the char-
acter will be used for deformation. Bones that
only act as targets for IK chains or intermediate
helper bones are rarely used for deformation.
All bones are created with Deform enabled by
default, so you will have to turn it off for each
bone you don't want to include.

The mother's rig is shown again in Figure 9.24,
with all bones made visible. In this illustration,

Figure 9.24 Blue represents bones that will be used for deformation;
red represents nondeforming bones