Parts of the Rig

The purpose of a good rig is to make it easier for an animator to control a character. In Blender, rigs are called armatures. An armature is like a container, inside of which you have the bones that comprise the rig. Here is a list of the elements that make up a rig:

Bones: Everything inside a rig is made of bones and the bones can have different uses, depending on how you set them up.

Control bones: When you are posing the character, it’s very helpful if you have certain bones that are made specifically for controlling how the rig works. For example, the leg is made up of several bones, but with a single control bone, you can move them all. Basically, control bones are the ones that you’ll animate later on.

Deform bones: These are the bones that deform the character’s model. Their purpose is just to deform the mesh, so they’re usually hidden and are moved by the control bones.

Helper bones: These bones are very important because they actually make the rig work. You could describe them as the engine of the rig because they make it function but they are hidden. They exist only to help the rig behave as you expect. You should not move them manually by any means. They’re automatically transformed by control bones.

Constraints: These define what bones do. You can tell a bone to follow the position of another bone, to copy its rotation, or limit its movements, or you can do other cool things like having one bone look at other bones (that’s how eyes are rigged). You can think of constraints as modifiers applied to the bones that define their behavior. For example, Inverse Kinematics (IK) is one of these constraints and you’ll see how to use it later on.

Custom Shapes: This feature allows you to change the visual representation of the bone to a custom object. This is beneficial because it gives animators a more intuitive view of how the rig is set up and which part of the character each bone controls.