Notes on Rigging
Workflow and tips
- Never rotate joints when building a skeleton.
Joints should rotate automatically to point to the next joint in the chain. - When animation: ONLY rotate joints and never move them
Moving a joint will change the length of the bone connecting it to the previous bone in the chain.
When animating you will of course be moving IK handles. - Prepare for blend shapes before skinning / weight painting.
- Start weight painting after your rig is functioning properly and your model is final.
- Do not scale your character (Mesh) and or a Rig after skinning.
When set up properly scaling the master controller should work - The Mesh (object) controlled / deformed by a skeleton should NEVER be parented to controller(s) / Rig.
If the mesh is moved by the same (master) controller that moves the joints that move the mesh, the mesh gets moved twice resulting in a doubling of all transfomations.
Adding Joints
If you add joints to a skeleton after you skinned (bound) the mesh, you can add them to this skin bind using:
Animate → Skin → Edit Smooth Skin → Add Influence
Moving Skinned Bones
You can still move joints after you skin your object, by using Animate Menu → Skin → Edit Smooth Skin → Move Skinned Joints Tool. Make sure to leave the tool (hit q to get back into select mode f.i.) before doing anything else!