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Beginner

 

Intro to rigging

 

Rigging  - easy with example - lazy guy! Hes super!!

Intermediate

This Tutorial from Critical Giant shows you his ideas about rigging a character.   He adds an armature with bones,and describes where he likes to start adding bones and positions them. He then names the bones that need mirroring (like the arms, legs) with .". L" as a suffix, telling blender to add a  " .r" to the right bones when they are added when he uses the symmetrize command.  He uses shift n to recalculate the bone roll in the axis he needs.  (To keep the local axis aligned with the world axis?)    He then parents the armature to the model with automatic weights. (called skinning) (Then after that, he is able to go into weight paint mode and paint weights for certain bones. (A tip I didn't know was to turn off lock model mode, so he can select the armature bones in pose mode, and edit the weight maps He says if you click on control key and the bone, you can edit the weight map of that bone Oh that's a "Critical Tip" :) )  He then is able to create control objects for the bones.  He is able to reposition bones in the pivot areas of the Model, so that when they rotate they follow the models natural pivot points, like the jaw, arms and legs.  Then he creates the inverse kinematics for the bones.  He adds special bones for the foot and knee not connected (parented) to the other bones, and adds an ik constraint to said foot bone.  A little confusing but you have to set the targets so rewatch that part a few times.  To bring the ik to the other leg, he uses the symmetrize command to duplicate the ik bones on the right side.
After that he says the character is rigged, and can add controls.  A good tip he states is to select a bunch of controls and hitting alt while you set the target custom object, applying that shape for all of those bones.   I also like that he adds circles for spine bones, and cubes for ik bones.  That differentiates them. I like his tip about changing the color of the controls of the bones so you can see them easily too.

 

 

Oh my a whole series of how to rig anything.  So well thought out.  Easy to understand, and very very informative. Watch the whole series.

 

What a great way to rig the knee. Says advanced, the concept is, his explanation and imlementation is Intermediate.

A timelapse of sculpting an anime girl, and rigging her too.  Looks great.

Advanced

Fixes a problem with the wrist.  Good solution

 

 

He has a free character that is game ready, and has drivers for shapekeys, and has animations.  He has the best anime type characters I've seen.