Rigging
If you want to bring your 3D model to life, you can use bones and animate them to make the 3D model move. Each bone has a limited amount of influence on the 3D model and it pivots on one end, just like most of our bones do.
This method of 'rigging' (creating a skeleton to animate your object) is super fast and easy. It has it's limitations, but it's good for simple poses and animations. It's based on a great and funny tutorial by Ian Hubert.
- Import your model
- Add an armature object
add > armature
. This adds the armature object and a single bone - Scale, reposition and move the bone as necessary. Extrude in edit mode to create a chain of bones.
- When adding separate bones (
shift + a
) parent them to the other bones . Choosewith offset
when you want empty space between them, or chooseconnect
when you want them to mesh together. - create a skeleton that fits the 3D object in it's current pose.
- Parent the object to the armature. Choose the option
with automatic weights
. - switch to pose mode. Now you can deform the 3D model with the armature.