Body Rigging

Body Rigging

When learning about animation we also had to learn some basic rigging of body’s because without rigging the animation would not be possible, for the very basic rig we simply looked at a normal joint with an Ik solver which I’ll get into shortly, this would give us everything we would need to make rigs of our own for virtually anything. To begin with we started with a cylinder which need segments running don its length because without this then the rig wouldn’t have geometry to manipulate. Once this was done I simply made the mesh untouchable in the layer tab so I wouldn’t accidentally move it.

Once this was done I simply went to the joint tool in the animation tab and then selected one end of the cylinder right in the middle and then placed a second directly in the middle of the cylinder and the final point on the opposite side from the original joint these are basically used as our bones for the make shift arm.

From here we simply selected both the bones and the cylinder and hit the button bind skin. This will make the movement of the bones affect the cylinder now like a regular arm, now to make this fully like a regular we need to make it so it unable to stretch and will maintain the same distance from wrist to shoulder with an elbow bend this is simply done with an ik solver which is essentially like ligament joining two bones together to do this press the ik solver tool again in animation and the press one the first bone we created and the second bone we created to and this will add the ligament.

This should complete a very basic arm rig but this can be used to rig almost everything

Here is the video on how to do it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghuD5Po6BS4

I thought this was a good way to rig even though I had never done it before simply because it was accessible and easy to understand for first time users and it makes life easier when you think of all these tools as bones and ligaments.