ResPower Super/Farm™ - Blender Tutorial : Character Rigging

By: Cory King

Overview

This is the second part in my tutorial on character creation with Blender. If you didn't read the first part, it can be found here. You will need at least the .blend file from that page to pick up where we left off last. I'm going to stop being quite so verbose with the tutorials from here. If you are still shaky with the basic concepts like moving the view, selecting and deselecting vertices and objects, and rotation and scaling, either read the first page again or hop over to blender.org and look for more help.

This tutorial covers modeling, rigging, and animation in Blender 2.40. It is mainly aimed at those who have little or no experience with these tools. Plenty of screenshots and intermediate .blend files will be provided so that readers can follow along and a .blend file of the finished product will be provided at the end.

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Dismembered

Locomotion -
As of now, our boss is a nice smooth blob with no legs, arms, or head. Let's fix the "no legs" part of that now. Open the .blend file from the last page and select the body blob. Move into edit mode and remove all of the vertices on the left side of the body, much the way we did in the first tutorial. This is sort of a step backwards, but it will simplify things later. We will simply duplicate and mirror the body again once it has arms and legs. Now, move to bottom view with Control+numpad 7. Use the face select tool by clicking the gray triangle in the toolbar.

Now pick a face where it looks like a leg would be protruding from this corpulent body. I picked this one.

Now move back into front view and press 'e' for extrude. Once you are extruding, hold down Control to move in 0.1 increments until the first D in the lower left corner is 0.800. Then press the left mouse button to commit, and hopefully you have something like this.

Our boss is really going to just be a glorified stick figure, but you can always change your mesh to reflect whatever level of detail you like.

Up in Arms -
Our arms are going to be basic sticks with very little detail as well, but again, if you would like fingers and toes, just play around with the mesh until you get something you are satisfied with. For our stick arms, we will choose a single face and extrude it. Here's the one I picked from the side view.

Now extrude with 'e' and make his arm as stubby as you dare.

I extruded to about 0.800 again for the arm.

Orange on a Toothpick -
Let's make a head. Since we want our head to be a part of the rest of our body mesh we will add a sphere to our scene while still in edit mode. So, switch to front view and with the cursor in the 3d viewing area, hit the spacebar and select Add->UVsphere. You won't need a full 32 segment and 32 ring sphere. Mine has 10 segments and 10 rings. Now rotate and position the sphere centered just above the body with the 'poles' at the top and the bottom and a line of vertices aligned with the z axis so that we can split the head in half later. You will probably need to switch back and forth between front, side, and top view several times to get the position and rotation just right. Now, scale it so that the head is very big and cartoony. Here is what mine looks like.

You will probably need to switch to object mode and click the 'Set Smooth' button again to get the head smooth. Now, zoom in very close on the space between the head and the body and select just the two vertices where the head should connect to the body. (Right click one, the Shift+right click the other.) Now, with two vertices selected, hit 'w' and choose merge. Then select 'At Center' from the second option window that pops up. This will, you guessed it, merge your two vertices into one vertex located halfway between the two previous vertices. Your scene should now render into something like this.

Nice, huh?

Delete and mirror...again -
Move into front view and edit mode and select and delete all of the vertices in our new head left of the z axis. Like this.

Now, move the cursor to the z axis again and snap it to the grid. Then switch your pivot point to 3d cursor and select all vertices with 'a'. Create a copy with Shift+d, then right click to make sure you don't move anything. Then 'm' to mirror and select "X Global". Now select all vertices with 'a' and then press 'w' and remove doubles. If no doubles are removed, you may have to go through each duplicated pair and manually merge them together. Now fix your normals with everything selected by pressing Control+n and you should have something like this.

Now we've made enough progress to give you a new .blend file.

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