Rigging the Base Meshes
After we completed the retopology on our character, we’ll need to add a rig to it if we ever want to pose and/or animate it in any way. A rig is basically a skeleton we add to a model that can move several vertices at once and is usually used to mimic how joints move in real life. Even though it’s mostly known for bringing characters to life, a rig can also be used on inanimate objects that need moving parts. This chapter is essential if you ever plan on having a character that can be posed and animated at some point.
This chapter will cover the following:
- The different types of movable joints in the human body
- Introduction to the rigging system in Blender
- Forward Kinematics (FK) rigging
- Inverse Kinematics (IK) rigging
- How to automatically generate a full rig with the built-in add-on Rigify
Before we start any rigging work, though, we’ll have to understand the different types of joints in the human body...
