Animating with Blender

Binding the Rig to the Mesh

The traditional way of achieving high quality deformations for character animation in Blender is the use of vertex groups and weight painting. That technique is still valid and useful, but a new addition to Blender’s deformation arsenal called the Mesh Deformer has made great deformations even easier to achieve. The mother uses both the armature/vertex group and Mesh Deformer techniques, so we’ll examine both.

If you would like to practice the techniques in this section, a file called “deform_practice.blend” has been included on the disc that accompanies this book. It contains the character mesh of the mother, the control armature, and the mesh deformer cage.