

Press E again and move it to the middle of the head.įrom the bottom of the center bone, add one bone down to complete the spine region as follows: Now that we have the first bone in place, we can connect it to other bones to create a tree hierarchy and thus move and rotate the arms and legs of our mesh.Ĭlick on the top of the center bone and press E to create a new bone connected to the previous one, then bring it up to the neck: To be able to see it, enable the X-ray mode:

Position it in the center of the torso of our model. Inside Blender, a rig is known as an armature. You can have more or fewer bones depending on if you want to rig each individual finger and/or toe joint, etc. Similarly happens with the legs, and we also have one bone for the neck as well: We have a center root that corresponds to the main bone of the structure and branches to the shoulders, elbows, and wrists. In Blender, the process of rigging is basically like creating a skeleton for a 3D mesh where we can rotate and modify the bones in order to rotate the rest of the mesh. In this lesson, we’re going to begin rigging our 3D character. We’ll start rigging our model in the next lesson. Lastly, rename the mesh to ‘ HumanoidModel‘. If we rotate our model, it’s going to rotate based on its feet. For that, press F3, type ‘set origin’, and select ‘ Origin to 3D Cursor‘: We want to define the center of the model to be at the base of its feet. With a front view, press G (holding down Shift so it snaps) and place the feet on the red line like so:Ĭlick on the Move button on the left menu to see the model’s pivot point: Next, go into edit mode, press F3, and go ‘ Recalculate Outside‘ again to fix all normal directions at once:

To speed up this process, let’s combine all our models into a single mesh by pressing A then Control + J. We see that the normals are now out as expected. With the right upper arm still selected, press F3 and then type ‘recalculate’ and select ‘ Recalculate Outside ‘. This means that the right-hand side of our model is in fact inside out. You’ll see that no lines come out this time, but if we increase the size of the normals then we can see them pointing through from the inside. Press Tab and select the other upper arm. We can see the normals as blue lines pointing outwards: To check it, select the left upper arm, press Tab to go into edit mode, then select the ‘ Display Normals‘ option under the ‘ Viewport Overlays‘ menu as follows: To start off, we want to make sure that our model’s normals directions are all facing the correct direction.Īs we flipped the left arm and leg to create their mirrored copies for the right-hand side, we also inverted these model faces which are now pointing to the inside of such objects (instead of to the outside). In this lesson, we’ll prepare our model to be rigged.
