Beginning the Rigging Process

In Chapter 3, we added and prepared a mesh for rigging, and we covered the core fundamentals of rigging. In this chapter, we are going to start rigging a human model. We will start by making sure to set up both the mesh and the armature correctly to avoid problems that can be hard to fix, or even diagnose, later down the line. Then, we will be placing the needed bones in the correct places to fashion ourselves a skeletal control that we can tie our human mesh to.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding the core ideas behind rigging
• Setting up the model
• Starting the rigging process
• Naming and mirroring

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to fully rig a human model. You’ll have learned how to place an armature, how to add bones to it, and how to name them correctly to avoid any confusion while rigging models.

Understanding the core ideas behind rigging

Before we start with this chapter, we should learn about the two core ideas of rigging:

• Study your subject! It’s important to understand how your subject moves in the first place. While this might be obvious for a human character, there’s a good chance you will encounter otherworldly masses of mesh that will require coordination with multiple team members or a little bit of creativity. Failure to give thought to this may lead to wasted hours as you may backtrack on mistakes you could have ironed out before starting.
• Stress and iterate! Once you think you are done, pose the whole rig into stressful poses. Placing bones into typical use case poses (being careful to not move them outside their intended range of motion) will reveal weak spots and deficiencies in any work. Bones might pull the wrong parts of the mesh or deformations may not match expectations when the rig is moved. A static pose provides no information...

Setting up the model

Before we go on to rigging and weighting, you need to be aware of some common pitfalls that can occur even before starting work. So, I will show you how to prepare the mesh you will be working with. Just before we continue placing our bones, we need to prep the model. Different people produce models differently and it’s up to us to deal with this. Issues such as scale, rotation, and object origins can cause massive headaches if we don’t deal with them before we begin.

Fixing scale, rotation, and origin

Select all the objects we are going to rig, press Ctrl + A with your mouse inside the viewport, and select All Transforms:

Figure 4.2 – Preparing objects

What this does is clear all stored transforms on models. Due to how Blender works, these transforms can be passed on and can influence other entities if used with constraints. This can cause all kinds of chaos. If you have made any changes to transforms and...

Starting the rigging process

In this section, we will start the rigging process by placing an armature and entering Edit Mode to make our first move with bones, following up with areas such as the spine, arms, legs, and hands.

We begin with the root bone, typically placing this bone at the hips of the rig, or the center of mass for the object. Other times, you may be required to place the root at the base of the model between the feet; it just depends on the use case for your rig. If it remains within Blender, then placing the root bone at the hips will do just fine. It’s common to place the root bone at the feet for game engines due to the way they work. We will cover a hip root setup for now.

Take exceptional caution when adding armature and beginning to rig. I ask that you place the armature object’s origin in the center of the scene because the human model also has its origin in the center. Matching the origins up is an absolute must. It costs nothing to match...

Naming and mirroring

In this section, we will be naming our bones using the Bone Properties tab and the correct naming standards. We will also be mirroring our rig with Symmetrize to finish the rigging process.

Naming can be very important depending on what kind of pipeline you are a part of. Motion capture and game engine exporting are two key instances where you really should name the bones in your rig. Renaming bones makes it easier to find them in the hierarchy and when typing in names to quickly set up constraints. It’s a quality-of-life improvement that should always be made when possible.

Rigs should follow a naming scheme that makes sense. Names must be specific to their bones: not Arm.001 and Arm.002 but instead UpperArm and LowerArm.

For humanoid characters, this is easy, but you may find that you’re rigging something that’s far from humanoid. If that’s the case, try to keep your naming short and readable, keeping in mind that your rig...

Summary

We started this chapter by setting up both our mesh and armature; for the mesh, we applied all transforms using Ctrl + A to prevent transform-related issues that are very common in rigging. We also set the origin of the mesh to the center of the scene by setting the transforms so that we can add an armature in the same place.

Moving on to bones, we made sure to place an armature with the same origin location as the mesh. With the armature set up, we went on to add all the bones needed to get the desired deformation, placing the bones closest to surfaces that demand more accurate deformation and further away from surfaces that are of little concern to the overall deformation (comparing the visible outside of the fingers to the obscured inside of the fingers is one example).

We then learned how to correctly name the bones with a consistent naming scheme, using suffixes such as .L or _L and names that represent the bone location to denote to Blender and any end users what...