Story Zoobi Rigging Animation Tools Used Resources Used View video

COSC 3P98 - Rigging

In order to be able to animate our character we first had to create a rig to be able to manipulate the vertices easily. Rigging is the process of creating a series of bones that when moved they move an appropriate area of the body. I first tried to set up a rig just for the leg using bone envelopes to establish the weights. Bone envelopes are a curved area around the bone which provide a strong pull on vertices in the inner envelope and a weaker pull on vertices in the outer envelope. Although the technique worked reasonably well it was not ideal and even after repeated attempts and using a technique known as weight painting to manually tweak the weights created by the envelopes the animations still had problems including weird distortions of the stomach area when moving the leg.

After viewing the blender cookie video (http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/01/04/rigging-an-alien/) about rigging an alien I decided to use the automatic weight painting built into blender. I had previously tried it with poor results, but having seen the video I realized that the automatic weight system does not work well unless you rig most of the body. When I rigged the whole body using automatic weight painting I was then finding that animation was far superior to my previous results.