Chapter 8: Rigging and Animating Your 3D Cartoon Character
In this chapter, we will bring our cartoon character to life by applying an animation rig to it and animating a walk cycle using keyframes. Rigging consists of adding bones to our character and converting the bones to an animation rig. This will allow us to animate the individual bones of our character to create animations such as a walk cycle. For the rigging process, we will make use of a free add-on that comes with Blender called Rigify.
Rigify will automatically setup Inverse Kinematics (IK) and Forward Kinematics (FK), which will make the animation process a lot easier – but more on that later in this chapter. Let's get started!
The main topics we'll cover in this chapter are as follows:
- Installing the Rigify add-on
- Importing our character and getting it ready for the rigging process
- Rigging our character using Rigify
- IK versus FK and rig layers
- Animating a walk cycle using...
