I am very slow at learning this...hope that you are patient.

Question

I have been a cancer patient on chemo, and broke my hip. I am going over your tutorials more than normal, because it is taking longer for it to sink in. However, I will be excited to learn your new storm rig. I am determined to become a good rigger.

Answer 1 · 2026-05-08T20:54:30Z

replied May 8, 2026 8:54pm

Don't worry about keeping up a certain pace! Learn as you have the mental bandwidth to do so and don't press yourself too hard. It sounds like you are already dealing with a LOT and it's expected that absorbing knowledge when you are stressed and your body is fighting to be healthy will be more challenging. Someone here will always be ready to help when you have any questions!

The Storm character and rig were developed by the Blender Studio. It uses their CloudRig, a rig generation addon similar to Rigify, but developed in-house specifically for the Blender Studio. The CloudRig addon is available via Edit> Preferences> Extensions if you are curious.

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Answer 2 · 2026-05-09T14:03:07Z

replied May 9, 2026 2:03pm

Hang in there. Rigging is commonly harder for most artist to learn. I find that playgrounding (AKA prototyping) helps the learning process. What is playgrounding? This is where you build a simple rig only to play(AKA test) around with a single concept or constraint. For example build a single leg. That's a 3 bone chain. Thigh, shin, and foot. Play with animating a kick. Then try it with none connected parenting. Then again with all bones aligned to the world making sure that the heads of the bones are at the same position on all 3 versions. Roll the bones to change the pointing of the axis and animate again. Basically physically see how the bones move and how adjustments like the roll affect how the bones move or behave. Then try this with an IK setup. Try different settings in the IK. Like with and without a pole target. Make it act weird or break it on purpose. This helps you learn what to look for when you have to trouble shoot a rig. The key thing is to have fun. Thus why I like the term playgrounding a rig. I forget which youtuber I heard this from. I think it was Dan Pro.

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Answer 3 · 2026-05-10T23:26:37Z

Wayne Dixon replied May 10, 2026 11:26pm

PPaulineLarson - If you want to learn, I want to help you do that. It also doesn't matter how that that takes.

Also as Coyo mentioned - the Storm rig wasn't created by me. Demter Dzadik rigged the body (with CloudRig) and Rik Schutte rigged the face (manually). They wrote a script that would combine the 2 rigs to produce the final control rig.

The secret to becoming a good rigger is to make lots of mistakes.....but learn from those mistakes. (if you don't do the second part you're just a glutton for punishment haha)

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Answer 4 · 2026-05-11T10:52:49Z

replied May 11, 2026 10:52am

One of the great things about online learning, especially a video format, is that you can learn at your own pace and watch and rewatch as many times as you want. Sometimes, I rewatch to remind myself and sometimes, a single view gets me what I wanted to learn. I even remember one particular video (Bartek Skorupa's Wood texture in the Shader Forge series) that I've spent hours watching and rewatching because it was so dense and I still don't feel like I fully understand it... but there's one or two things from that video that I use all the time to this day when I'm making my own materials (with a few tweaks thanks to improvements in Blender over the years). I'll even play a video and pause and rewind while I'm doing things step by step as I follow along. (Done this a lot with Human for example... one I've done several times partly because I keep getting distracted before I fully finish a piece :D ) The only right pace is to learn is the one that works for you :D

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