What is Rigging?
Rigging is the art of preparing something for movement. What the skeleton and muscles are to the human body or the engine and wheels are to a car, so rigging is to 3D graphics. Therefore it’s an extremely important part of the animation pipeline. And like a car engine and a human skeleton, rigging is a very technical skillset that can get complex. But this course is designed to ease you into the subject, so we’re just focusing on the fundamentals. And there’s 2 methods of rigging with Blender that we’re going to cover:
Mechanical Rigging
Mechanical rigging focuses on object-to-object relationships and constraints, similar to machinery in a car engine or other mechanizations. Chris Kuhn is one of the best mechanical riggers in the Blender community and he’s your instructor for this first chapter. NOTE: Chris' advanced helicopter rig is available on Blendswap.
Character Rigging
Character Rigging, as you can imagine, is focused on characters. This is very much the digital equivalent of skeletons moving a body, whether human or creature. It centers around a unique object type in Blender, called an armature. This armature is primarily used to deform a model organically. NOTE: An advanced Baker Rig is available to download as a CG Cookie Resource.
CC Attribution
Where to go from here?
Check out all of our Blender rigging courses!
