Summary
Other books and tutorials on character animation will attempt to pull you through a lengthy section on rigging your character before you learn to animate it. If you’ve taken a peek at Rain’s hidden armature layers or looked at all her bones in the Outliner area, you can begin to appreciate why we skipped that particular task. In my opinion, learning to rig before learning to animate is like having to build a bicycle before learning to ride one – someone had to do it, but that person shouldn’t have to be you. It took long enough to learn how to pose Rain without also having to name each bone ourselves!
Anatomy is a word with a twofold meaning when referring to a character rig. It could mean the shape and dimensions of the character, but it can also mean the invisible relationships between armature bones. An advanced character rig is an organism unto itself; a creature with its own hyper-anatomy, whose humanoid form is only a projection. What’...
