An introduction to the rigging process

We are now going to discover the process of character rigging. The point of this is to prepare objects or characters for animation in order to pose them in a simple way. For instance, when rigging a biped character, we will place virtual bones that mimic the character's real skeleton. Those bones are going to have relationships between them. In the case of a finger, for instance, we will usually add three bones that follow the phalanges. The tip bone will be the child of the mid bone, which in turn will be the child of the top bone. So when we rotate the top bone, it will automatically rotate its children. On the top of the network of the bones, we will need to add some constraints that define automation so that it is easier for the animator to pose the character. The next step is to specify to the geometry to follow the bones in some way. For instance, in the case of a character, we will tell Blender to deform the mesh according to the deformable bones...