Rigging is the fifth stage in the 3D production pipeline and is a crucial stage before the pipeline can continue onto animation. Rigging is essentially the process of creating a “skeleton” for a 3D model to give it the ability to move and mimic real world skeletal systems whilst maintaining its form. (Im, 2013) The rig is created utilizing many features including the following:
Joints, the points of articulation created to control the model, sometimes called bones they work in the same way as joints in a human body.
Joint Hierarchy, The order in which joints can influence other joints they are connected to, this is used to created realistic body movements to allow for certain movements to influence other parts of the model.
Constraints, This allows for the movement of an object’s position, rotation and scale to be constrained to the movement of another object, allowing the movement of one item to move several items.
Forward Kinematics(FK), This means that the character rig will follow the joint hierarchy chain, this can mean more control of the chain.
Inverse Kinematics(IK), this mean that the “child” within the joint hierarchy can influence the movement of the joints further up the chain.
Weight Painting, this is a vital step in the rigging process and allows users to manually set how much influence a joint has on a particular section of mesh, therefore limiting the amount that mesh will be deformed when a movement occurs. (Masters, 2014)
3D Rig of Atlas from Portal, image sourced from: http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?128641-Portal-2-ATLAS-character
Sources
Masters, M. (2014). Key 3D Rigging Terms to Get You Moving. Retrieved March 4, 2015, from Digital Tutors: http://blog.digitaltutors.com/key-rigging-terms-get-moving/
Im, D. (2013, September 10). Learn about 3d Character Rigging in Blender 3D. Retrieved March 4, 2015, from HubPages: http://dreamsgatelm.hubpages.com/hub/BlenderCharacterRigging
3D Animation and Art 