Animating with Blender

Testing Your Rig

When the rig is created and deformers are set up, you need to test the entire contraption. The best way to do it is to pick the most demanding scene from your story reel and put your character through its paces. Actions to watch out for that will show shortcomings in your rig are as follows:

• Any time a character (or a part of a character) rotates more than 180 degrees from its initial position, or even worse, past 360 degrees: Think a backflip or a character pacing around in a circle. Sometimes joints and bones will “flip” or “pop” at those points, creating bad breaks in animation. These kinds of problems can be identified early on, even during the B-Bone visualization stages before a mesh is attached. If you are only finding ...