This version of the documentation has been edited to contain only relevant and shareable information, but otherwise has not been altered. These notes represent my actual thought process while learning, not a post-mortem analysis.
I’m learning to rig in Blender! I’m following this video:
Amazingly EASY Way To Rig Characters in Blender 4.1
Important to note, however: we will be using rokoko motion capture for most/all of our animations. I wasn’t able to find a rokoko rig to download but they have free animations on their website. It would certainly be helpful to check the rig in those animation files to make sure we’re using the same/similar bones, but I’m honestly not too worried about them matching up. Retargeting was going to be necessary to some degree no matter what. I plan to follow this tutorial to create my rig and make any alterations that may be necessary once it’s done.
The tutorial doesn’t include finger bones. This is the method that I am trying:
As you can see, the finger bones appear to be unattached to the wrist. This is not the case. An interesting discrepancy I found between rigging in maya (what I’m used to) and rigging in blender (new to me) is that in blender, the skeleton is more focused on BONES, whereas in maya I find it’s more concerned with JOINTS. In maya, I would have done it like this:
The wrist is simply a JOINT, not a BONE, per se. The finger JOINTS (red) would be constrained to the movement of the wrist.
However, this does not seem to be the way of blender. By doing it this way I created five finger bones that each could rotate independently from the pivot point of the wrist. In blender, the bones rotate from their base, or “head”, and one does not seem to make boneless “joints” in this way. I actually think I prefer this blender way. It makes more sense to me. each joint has one bone and each bone has one joint, for the most part. In order to keep this hand making sense, I made the wrist bone the one connecting the middle knuckle to the wrist, and parented the other fingers to the wrist bone. This allows me to select the wrist bone and operate as normal, with the other fingers constrained to it.
I decided to include a clavicle bone. In all of my work with Advanced Skeleton and unreal engine, a clavicle seems to be an invaluable addition. The tutorial seems to include a clavicle-like bone, though they never mention it, instead calling it the “shoulder”:
I placed my clavicle close-ish to the front of the model, as that’s what I remember doing with AdvSkel and UE5.
When placing a joint, I always try to imagine how the model will deform. if the joint is closer to the surface of the model, the geometry closest to the joint will deform the least, and the geometry farther away with deform more, potentially appearing stretched, engorged, or pinched.