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Rigging

Rigging assembles the bones, weights, and constraints that let an animator pose geometry. The Designer's rigging is small but covers the common skin-and-bones pipeline: joint chains, skin binding, 2-bone IK, painted weights, and constraints.

When you need a rig

Rig when:

  • A character or creature placement needs articulated motion (a butterfly's wings rotating around their hinge, a flag waving from a pole).
  • Animating raw vertex positions would be impractical.
  • You want pose-able controls instead of direct attribute keys.

Skip rigging for:

  • Simple Bend / Twist / Sine motion (use deformers).
  • Whole-placement transforms (translate / rotate / scale alone).

The Rigging menu set

Press F3 to switch to Rigging. The menu bar gains:

Menu Common entries
Skeleton Create Joint Chain (3 / 5), Insert Single Joint, Orient Joint
Skin Bind Skin to Selected Mesh, Apply Skin Deform
Solve Solve 2-Bone IK on Selected Chain, Pole Vector Constraint
Paint Paint Weights submenu
Constraints Parent, Point, Orient, Aim, Scale, Clear

These are reachable from the top-level Rigging menu in any set; the menu-set switch just promotes them to the most prominent positions.

A minimum rig

  1. Create a joint chain of 3 joints along the mesh's shoulder→elbow→wrist line.
  2. Bind skin to the mesh.
  3. Set up 2-bone IK between the wrist and the shoulder.
  4. Move the IK target placement to pose the arm.

Five clicks for a posable arm. Same workflow scales to a butterfly's left wing or a robotic forelimb.

Per-vertex weighting

After Bind Skin, every vertex carries one or more joint weights that determine how it follows the joints. The framework's default is "rigid" (each vertex follows the closest joint with full weight); for smooth deformations use Paint weights to fine-tune.

Constraints

Constraints couple one placement's transform to another's:

  • Parent: child inherits all transforms.
  • Point: child inherits translation only.
  • Orient: child inherits rotation only.
  • Aim: child rotates so its forward axis points at the target.
  • Scale: child inherits scale only.

See Constraints.

v1 limitations

  • IK is 2-bone only; FK chains of any length work, but IK multi-bone solvers (Spine IK, Spline IK) are roadmap.
  • No HumanIK / full skeleton template ships in v1.
  • Blendshape rigs are in v1 via rig.shape_editor (a basic editor); advanced blendshape workflows are roadmap.

See also