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...