Animating with Blender

A Checklist for Preparing Rigged Characters for Life as a Library

Before you hit Save and close your character’s master file for the last time (Oh, who are we kidding? You’ll be back in here many times over the course of the rest of the animation. Many, many times.), there are some things to confirm that will make your life easier when animation begins. It’s worth checking each of these items for every character in your project before linking them into a single production file:

• All meshes that are part of a character have rotations of 0 and scales of 1. If not, use Ctrl-A to apply them. You should have done this long ago (you were warned!), and applying errant rotations and scaling now might cause unpredictable problems, resulting in your having ...