Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook: With this highly focused book you’ll learn how to bring your characters to life using Blender, employing everything from realistic movement to refined eye control. Written in a user-friendly manner, it’s the only guide dedicated to this subject.

Our first chapter was about some general and basic rigging practices that you can apply to most situations, regardless of their purpose: they can be used for characters and props, for example. From now on, the rigging chapters will talk about how to build our character by focusing on its body parts. This chapter is about our character's torso: we're going to see how to create hips, a spine, and a neck.

There are various ways of approaching this subject, and we're going to see a mix of solutions ranging from unique to adapted ideas by reverse-engineering some well known rigs available online, such as the ManCandy rig, Ludwig, or the Blender Foundation's open movie characters. While these solutions are not the only way to go, you can achieve quite satisfactory results and its building processes are far from being rocket science.

Aside from what you'll learn from here, it's important for you to take a look at how some of those rigs were built. You'll see some similarities, but also...

A human spine, also called vertebral column, is a bony structure that consists of several vertebrae (24 or 33, if you consider the pelvic region). It acts as our main axis and allows us a lot of flexibility to bend forward, sideways, and backward. And why is this important to know?

That number of vertebrae is something useful for us riggers. Not that we're going to create all those tiny bones to make our character's spine look real, but that information can be used within Blender. You can subdivide one physical bone for up to 32 logical segments (that can be seen in the B-Bone visualization mode), and this bone will make a curved deformation based on its parent and child bones. That allows us to get pretty good deformations on our character's spine while keeping the number of bones to a minimum.

This is good to get a realistic deformation, but in animation we often need the liberty to squash and stretch our character: and this is needed not only in cartoony animations...

If you want your character to move like Elvis, you'd better pay attention to its pelvis. The technique we're going to see in this recipe is often called "inverted pelvis", and you'll understand why when you go through the next few paragraphs.

This approach is very useful to achieve more relaxed poses with your characters. The pelvis is usually the first bone in the spine chain and, because of the nature of the bone structure, its pivot point for transformation is not at the ideal position for the twist movement that we can do with the pelvis. That's because our actual center of gravity is closer to our belly button than it is to the base of the bone.

The next screenshot shows a balanced pose that is easier to achieve with this kind of setup:

When you animate a character, the main goal is to make it look alive, isn't it? All techniques involved in the art of animation, regardless of the medium (paper, computers, clay...) have the same goal: help you make the audience believe that your character is a living being.

It can be very useful to add a controller to make your character look like its breathing. Although the breathing by itself isn't going to make your character believable, it can be added as a layer of visual complexity, contributing to the mood of a scene. If your character is nervous, scared, or has just finished a sprint for instance, you should probably make the breathing more noticeable.

Our head movement can be broken down to basically two controllers: the head bone itself and the neck. It is possible to rotate the neck while keeping the head straight and vice-versa. For example, to move your head forward you have three options:

It is very useful in rigs to have the freedom to choose how your neck and head should behave when transforming their parent bones. You should be able, for example, bend your character's torso forward while keeping its neck and head looking forward, without inheriting their parents' rotation. This is often called hinge control. In this recipe we'll learn how to properly control the ...