Anttilat

My breaks just keep getting longer, it seems. But I took some time to continue again, this time learning about rigging. I've been doing the tutorial in "The Essential Blender" ch. 7, rigging and skinning. Right now I'm through the rigging part, skinning I'm planning on doing later today.

In the beginning of the chapter the writer talks about how many artists see rigging as an intimidating task because they see so complicated rigs. This rig, however, is supposed to be fairly simple. True enough, I didn't find this tutorial any more difficult than the earlier parts of the book.

I'm using the latest stable version of Blender, 2.46. This affected a little in this hands-on part. There were some things that are easier now. For example, when creating parent/child relationships to mirrored bones the book explained how I need to do this to both sides as the mirror effect doesn't help here. I just wondered this for a while because the parent was mirrored and continued happily: clearly some wished-for improvements have been made.

The beginning of rigging was boring in much the same way as the beginning of character animation was. Making the rig seemed to involve a lot of manual, repetitive work. But when I finally saw my rig moving and could play with IK effects etc, I felt like I'd really accomplished something.

Here's a picture of Hank's rig put in a dramatic pose. Few more pages to go through and I'll get such a dramatic pose out of Hank's mesh, too!