A Complete Guide to Character Rigging for Games Using Blender

This book is a comprehensive guide to using Blender to create character rigs for games, breaking down the technicalities of rigging tools and techniques into easily digestible chunks. It provides all the tools needed to go from a static character model to an animation-ready, high quality, and fast performing game rig.

Written to be accessible and easy to follow, the book covers character rigging theory that is supported by industry standard examples of how to apply that theory to character rigs for video games. It demonstrates the reasoning behind rigging decisions followed by instructions and examples on how to apply that knowledge to rig creation. It includes chapters that focus on the character deformation techniques that raise the visual quality of the model and subsequently of the animation and game it will be used in.

This book will be vital reading to those studying games animation as well as early-career rigging artists, character animators, modeling artists, technical animators, and technical artists.

Chapter 1: Introduction. Chapter 2: The Big Picture. Chapter 3: What is a Game Rig. Chapter 4: Blender Tools and Concepts. Chapter 5: 3D World and Transformation. Chapter 6: Armatures. Chapter 7: Bones. Chapter 8: Mesh Topology and Deformation. Chapter 9: Scene and Model Preparation. Chapter 10: Naming. Chapter 11: Rig Creation Approach. Chapter 12: Root Bone. Chapter 13: Body Deformation Skeleton. Chapter 14: Bone Orientations. Chapter 15: Body Skeleton Orientations. Chapter 16: Weights. Chapter 17: Weight Painting Method. Chapter 18: Weighting the Body. Chapter 19: Weight Transferring Techniques. Chapter 20: Bone Constraints. Chapter 21: Essential Constraints. Chapter 22: Dealing with Clutter. Chapter 23: B-Bone Rigging. Chapter 24: Drivers. Chapter 25: Rig Building Blocks. Chapter 26: Body Rig. Chapter 27: Correctives. Chapter 28: Facial Rigs. Chapter 29: Cloth and Hair. Chapter 30: Space Switches. Chapter 31: Props. Chapter 32: Rig Finalizing. Chapter 33: Animation. Chapter 34: Export.