Blender for Beginners: An Introduction to Rigging

Rigging can be intimidating for beginners just starting to dip their toe into this section of the CG pipeline. Between, weight painting, constraints, axis roll, Inverse/forward kinematics, there are alot of terms to keep straight!

In this Skillshare class, we'll be covering all of these topics. by the end, my goal is to help you become more familiar with terms and concepts associated with rigging so you can start creating more complex setups to bring your creations to life. Prior blender knowledge is encouraged but NOT required to complete this class. I will have all my keystrokes visible on the screen so you can see exactly what I'm doing.

Rigging is a specialized position in many larger studios that takes years to master. However, learning this skill and having it in your CG arsenal, will help make you a more well rounded CG artist.

Grab some coffee (or tea) and I'll see you in the first section!

Road map:

Lesson 1-2:

• We'll start off learning some base concepts and techniques that will help later on when we go to rig and pose a complete human character (excluding facial rigging as this is a topic for another class). The base mesh was created using make human; a free open source program that you can download and learn more about here.

Lesson 3:

• We'll take what we've learned thus far, and create a simple rig for the provided box asset that only consists of a few bones that will help reinforce these concepts before diving into the more complex human rig.

Lesson 4:

• This section will be broken up into 6 different parts. I'll take you through the entire process of importing a human base mesh, adding a rig, applying constraints and controls and finally attaching the final rig to your human character.

• Course Trailer
• Inverse and Forward Kinematics
• Weight Painting and Bendy Bones
• Creating a Simple Box Rig
• Human Rig: Initial Setup
• Human Rig: Setting up the Lower Body
• Human Rig: Setting up the Upper Body
• Human Rig: Fingers & Bone Constraints
• Human Rig: Skinning our Armature
• Human Rig: Custom Bone Shapes
• Thank You!