Rigging Fundamentals Overview for Blender

Discover how Blender armatures use bones to pose objects, add bones with Shift-A, switch between object and edit modes, and manage layers and parenting with keep offsets or connected.

Learn how to use custom shapes in blender rigs to give bones a distinct look, replacing bones with custom objects, aligning to origin points, adjusting axes, and managing normals.

Shape keys in Blender deform vertices with a basis and a key, interpolating their values. Use vertex groups and relative to another shape key to refine results.

Learn to drive Blender properties with conditional if statements, using a variable, a condition, and true/false branches to control rotation, scale, and other drivers.

Learn how radians relate to degrees in Blender, how a circle’s radius defines an arc, and how to set rotation limits in drivers.

Learn how to link and append assets from external Blender files, manage library overrides, and make materials local using custom properties to preserve edits across scenes.

Master constraint basics in Blender, including bone and object constraints, bone orientation and constraint axes, and world, local, and pose space. Understand influence, target, and owner, plus how misconfigurations appear.

Learn to use Blender's copy location, rotation, and scale constraints to mirror a target bone's transforms, switch between world and local space, and combine with copy transforms for unified motion.

Apply limit distance, location, rotation, and scale constraints to bones in Blender, using min/max values and space options to control transforms and prevent unwanted movement.

Demonstrate using the damped track constraint in Blender by setting a target bone, adjusting axes (X, Y, Z), and comparing it with other track constraints for simple tracking.

Use the track to constraint in Blender to keep bone axes aligned with the target, minimize twisting, and define tracking axes (primarily the z axis with others as needed).

Master the locked track constraint to keep a bone fixed on one axis, align the negative X for correct tracking, and note it ignores Z movement while tracking.

Learn to use shrinkwrap constraints to drive bones to surface meshes via projection modes, axes and distance controls; explore with a sphere example and compare projection versus surface points.

Explore the child of constraint in Blender, enabling a targeted, axis-specific parent-child relationship between bones, with transform control, offset resets via inverse, and cautions against replacing real parenting.

Apply the follow path constraint to make an armature follow a curve, align origins, adjust offset with fixed position, and control speed with the graph editor and modifiers.

Learn how the clamp to constraint snaps a bone to a curve and moves it along that curve, with axis options including automatic and the cyclic option.

Explore action constraints in Blender to animate multiple bones and properties from a single target, using the action editor, keyframes, and dope sheet for precise rigging.

Learn to set up a Blender transform constraint that drives a target bone’s movement and rotation from another bone using map from, map to, local space, and axis settings.

Explore how inverse kinematics constrains the final bone to a target, builds a forward kinematic chain, and tunes pole targets, chain length, and iterations for realistic rigging.

Master spline IK in blender by creating a curve, building a bone chain, constraining it to the curve, and attaching hawk controls to the curve handles.