Introduction to Rigs and Terminologies

This book will offer detailed instructions to help you build your own rigs using Blender, a free and open source 3D software used by many worldwide to produce stunning visuals, assets, and stories. You will progress from adding bones to an empty scene and learning how to weight paint to rigging a humanoid character in Blender, while learning all the necessary buttons for rigging and success-boosting tips. You will then move on to implementing advanced features such as drivers, constraints, and custom handles, all of which will be expected of a professional rig. By the end of this book, you will have the ability to create rigs of all shapes and sizes, compatible with the pipelines of many teams and studios.

In this first chapter, we will start by understanding the basic terminologies that will be used throughout this book and are necessary to follow along. We will start with the anatomy of bones and how they work together to produce rigs. Then...

Technical requirements

Anything later than the following will be able to run Blender:

Operating system: Windows 8.1+, macOS 10.13+, or Linux

I recommend you use a system with 8 GB of system memory and at least a modern dual-core processor. Blender is exceptionally easy to run; the tasks you will tackle in this book will pose no more than a light workload for any computer built within the last five years.

You can find out more on the official Blender website: https://www.Blender.org/download/requirements/.

Terminology – understanding the anatomy of a bone

We need to start somewhere, so let’s get ourselves acquainted with the basics of bones and rigs!

Figure 1.2 shows a single bone, which is the basic building block of any rig:

Figure 1.2 – A single bone

Bones on their own are remarkably simple; they consist of a Head, a Tail, and a Body. Heads and tails are pretty confusing, as they are the opposite of what you might think. The head is at the bottom and the tail is at the top. If you struggle to remember, just think about how for most animals with a tail, it’s smaller than their head.

Bones typically work in a hierarchy, going head to tail to form chains, with the first bone being at the top of the hierarchy. All bones after the first bone within the same chain will be shown under it in the Outliner window. When multiple chains are part of a single rig, there will be a selected master bone, a root bone; typically, this has...

Understanding the structure of a rig

In this section, we will introduce you to rigs, the core of this book. This will touch on topics such as IK and FK, handles, and shapes, and then we will move on to using Blender and its controls to make our first rig. Take a look at Figure 1.5; it’s a simple rig made up of bones.

Figure 1.5 – A rigged human atop a rigged horse

Some points of interest in this rig are as follows:

• Tails flow into heads: Bones never meet tail to tail or head to head.
• Some bones have different colors: This is Blender’s default way to show which bones have special properties, relationships, or constraints. You don’t need to worry about this for now; it’s just nice to know that these colors highlight bones with significance.
• Floating bones: Up to now, I have maintained the idea that bones are used to deform a mesh; however, that isn’t always true. Sometimes, you will find bones with...

Starting with Blender

Before we begin with anything practical, we will need to set up Blender. It’s relatively simple to do; it installs just like any other program, and we will not change any of its default settings right now.

Setting up Blender

Before proceeding, we must ensure we're all starting on the same page. In this book, we will use Blender 3.2.2. You can go ahead and download it from the official Blender website: https://www.Blender.org. Make sure you meet the minimum requirements to run Blender. Anything that can browse the web will probably be able to run Blender.

To set up Blender, follow these steps:

1. Go to the official Blender website (https://www.Blender.org) and download it. The version number usually doesn’t matter, but if you download Blender 3.2.2, you can make sure everything works as this book is written with that in mind.
2. Install Blender by running the Blender-x.x.x-windows-x64.msi file and follow the onscreen instructions...

Summary

After reading this chapter, you should now have a good idea of what bones and rigs look like and how they can translate (move) and transform (scale).

We then moved on to installing Blender from the official website. It’s important you only install trusted software, as there are a fair number of websites that offer Blender; however, you will find all of them (apart from the official website) contain malware. Finally, we finished the chapter by showing a handy screenshot of some labeled UI elements; again, this isn’t too important currently because we will cover important UI elements when necessary.

This was a short chapter just to get you up to speed with some basic terminology and ideas about rigging. It’s pretty much all there is for the hands-off theory that we will cover; the rest of the book will be an all-practical approach to learning rigging in Blender. If you’re not sure about anything we have covered, you don’t need to worry...