Rigging and Skinning - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 158

● Select your armature, enter pose mode, grab the master bone, and translate the whole thing. The entire
character should move at once, without distortion. If parts are left behind, check their modifi er setup
to ensure that they have deformers available that are somehow attached to the controls. If the character
deforms bizarrely, you may have parented either the armature, mesh deform cage, or lattice directly to
the character mesh. You can try Alt-P to break the relationship and hope for the best.
● Name all of your objects appropriately. A good scheme for naming objects related to a character is to
begin with an abbreviation of the character's name, followed by an underscore and an abbreviation of the
particular portion of the character setup. Figure 9.54 shows the mother with the names of the different
objects showing. This makes it very easy to identify which objects you need to select when linking the
character into a scene, as well as which objects belong to which character in the Outliner.

mom_eye_R

mom_harmbones

mom_cage

mom_harmbody

mom_harm_legs

Figure 9.54 The mother, with her different objects named for easy recognition. The term “harm” in the naming scheme refers to “har-
monic deformation,” another name for the mesh deformer