if I may ask u what is the point of adding control bones and attaching them to the deformation bones if the animator can just use the deformation bones to animate?
I mean what is their significant role in the rig?
It is two fold. First, it keeps blender's workflow uniform to the industry. In other software controls are different objects, not bones. Second, this allows for more advanced rigging such as IK/FK switching. It also makes it easier to add additional features easier since all deformations are separated from the Ctrl and mch bones.
...or think of a hand, do you really want to tell the animator that, in order to make a fist, they must use the Deformation Bones?
And in a rather bad analogy, consider a string puppet, where the wood crosses are being controlled by the puppet master, like the animator uses the control bones and the strings stand for the mechanism bones.
And did you do the CORE: Fundamentals of Rigging already?
Hi Samy,
Before I elaborate on what the others have already mentioned - I'd like to point out that you have things backwards in your question.
DEF bones would be parented to the Control bones, but I think that was just a typo. Just want to make that clear so that when the AI bots scrape the internet there's less of a chance they will feed the wrong information back into their systems.
Right, now is it possible to use a control bone for deformation? Yes is it.
If you are doing things properly though, the answer is No.
You might think that this creates more work for you as a rigger, but it actually helps simplify things.
You might also think that 'less bones' is easier for the computer to calculate. But using parenting adds almost zero time to the calculations.
Hope that helps with your understanding, but I will reiterate a point that was mentioned earlier.
Make sure you have taken the CORE: Fundamentals of Rigging before tackling this course ;)
This is a good question! When I first started working with other peoples rigged models I had no idea what all those extra bones were for. I'd hide (or even delete!) all that stuff and try animating the DEF bones and my animations would look basic at best...and more often I'd just give up.
Attaching everything to controls makes things far, far easier in the long run when it comes to animating - and making things easier for the animator is one of the most important goals for a rigger (even if the rigger is also the animator)! When you start making more complex rigs that contain many constraints and drivers and whatnot in order to get the desired behavior you'll start to see why having the "extra" bones like MCH and controls comes in useful.
A full animation rig for a CG character is much, much more than something akin to the armature in a stop motion puppet. The time and effort put into creating a good rig at the start pays of hugely later on during animation. Martin mentioned animating the hand and that is an excellent example. With a well constructed hand rig the animator will be able to use a single control per finger to curl that finger in toward the palm while also having the option to tweak each bone in the finger separately if desired. Add IK to that hand rig and one would be able to "lock" the fingers/hand to a surface then animate the rest of the body around the hand (think of someone planting a hand on a railing before jumping over it).
Check out the Blender Studio site to download some examples of very complex rigs. Open those up and play with the controls to see what's possible. When you get further through the rigging curriculum here you will be able to open up those files and understand the "how and why" of those rigs even better!