Animating with Blender

To Deform or Not?

Not every bone in your armature should be used to actually deform the mesh via vertex groups or to drive the other styles of deformers. The Deform option on a bone’s Armature Bones panel signals to Blender whether the bone should be used or not. In general, bones that follow the actual structure of the character will be used for deformation. Bones that only act as targets for IK chains or intermediate helper bones are rarely used for deformation. All bones are created with Deform enabled by default, so you will have to turn it off for each bone you don’t want to include.

The mother’s rig is shown again in Figure 9.24, with all bones made visible. In this illustration, bones that are set to deform are highlighted in blue, while ...