Rigging and Skinning - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 152

Combining Different Deformation Methods with Vertex Groups

While the Beast's dogs only use Mesh Deform modifi ers, both the Beast and his mother required something
more complex. To use only a Mesh Deform modifi er for them, the fi nger and toe animation would have
needed a cage almost as articulated as the fi ngers themselves. Notice, in Figure 9.44, how the mother's hands have
only a large, very simple structure around them. While the rest of the character is deformed by a mesh deformer,
we want to use regular Armature modifi er deformation on the hands and fi ngers the whole way up to the elbow.

Figure 9.44 The mother's left hand contained within a simple cage

Figure 9.45 shows a part of the mother's modifi er stack.
A Mesh Deform modifi er is fi rst, followed by an Armature
modifi er. The Mesh Deform modifi er appears without any
remarkable settings, exactly as you have confi gured it in the
previous section. However, the Armature modifi er makes use
of a number of settings we have yet to examine.

The MultiModifi er button tells the modifi er that instead of
using the previous modifi er's result as its starting point, it should
use the original mesh, then blend the result of the previous
modifi er with the current one using the specifi ed vertex group.
In this example, it means that the Armature modifi er comes

Figure 9.45 The modifi er stack for the mother's
deformation