Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Rigging the Arm

While rigging the arms will be fairly easy, arms can be more complex. Usually, they’re also animated using IK, but because they’re not constantly touching a surface, you may prefer to use Forward Kinematics instead. For that situation, you can create what is called IK/FK Blend, which is basically a rig made of three different chains: the IK arm, the FK arm, and the deform arm, which blend using Copy Rotation constraints between the IK and the FK. As this is just an introduction to rigging, you’re only going to build the IK rig, but you should look into IK/FK Blending if you like rigging. In Figure 11.5, you can see the resulting rig for the arm.

Figure 11.5 The arm’s IK rig in Wireframe display mode so you can see the IK target ...