Part 6: Rigging of my tutorial series on beginner Blender modeling and getting it to behave with Unity is up! This is a longer one, but should make everything involving setting up the bone structure of your character clear and easy to understand! There are also lots of screenshots, so you won’t get lost 😀

I created Sail using this process, so if you like my style of low-poly graphics and are wondering how on earth I made the models, UV’d, textured, rigged, and animated them all in 48 hours, you might be interested in this series! I’m trying to crank out a post per day for the next week, each covering a different aspect of the workflow.

Also, I’m totally open to feedback on these articles! Please let me know if any parts are confusing, or overdrawn, or straight-up wrong! You can leave a comment here, or on my site (no email or registration is required–  you can leave any or all the fields blank in the comment form), or let me know on Twitter!

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Rigging is the process of adding “bones” to a mesh, greatly simplifying the animation process. Each bone is associated with the nearby vertexes on your mesh, so when you transform a bone, it will drag the vertices with it. The entire set of bones are collectively called an “armature,” or a “rig.”

First off, you’ll want to set up the Blender UI to make rigging your character a bit more manageable. Change your UV frame back to a 3D Viewport, activate Object Mode (Tab, and this will change both of your viewports to Object Mode), and set the shading mode to Solid on both views. You’ll also want to set the left viewport to a front ortho view (Numpad 1) and the right viewport to a left ortho view (Numpad 3).

Read the rest on my site!