3D - Rigging

Rigging... Huh, that is something I have been scarend since I started for learning this 3D stuff. You know, if you make a model with 3D-program, you can not almost in any situations use it except as a static object if you don't rig it. But what is rigging?

Imaginate, that you have done the most beautiful and nice 3d model ever and textured it and made nice renders of it and everything. Yeah, your model is not ready yet. You just can not use it in animation without the setup that makes it more easy to animate. Of course you can try to animate all the vertices by single, but the result looks like a type of shit and you will waste rest of your life with it.

So by doing the control system for the model we will avoid that kind of frustration. In nut shell: rig is the system for animating the 3D-model.

In my caption I told that I have been scared for the rigging works and I can tell that I still do not love it even thought I have started for learning it. Modeling the 3D-models is pretty easy, you can learn to make simple 3d-models in really short time. But rigging is much harder because as a 3D model you can just watch a picture and copy the details to your 3d-model. In the rig you can not do that. There is too much of invisible functions in that system that you just neet to know exactly what to do if you want to make a complite working rig to your character.

I started this journey with doing mechanical rigging tutorial. Here it is.

So I just made same kind of robot that he also has made and then started following the tutorial.
Here is the picture of my robot and its rig:

Now with the control bones (the sticks) I can control the animation of this object.

Okay, if I am honest with this: That my robot rig does not work as well as I saw the one working in the tutorial. It made me realise that I need to practise this. I dont know why this happened, but I did set the bone to be rotated only for an example in x axis and it won't rotate in any other direction. Then if I add a control bone for few that kind of limited rotation bones, I still can with that control bone to make them rotate in the wrong directions. I have no idea for why this happens, but I need to find it out.

Update: I did ask on the blenderartists.org forum about this rigging problem and few really nice guys did help me for doing it better.

So I started to model some really bad looking car, just only to make it to be a rigged model.

This is my first car rig. Its not so nice and there is no one controlling bones for controlling the other bones, but it works still very well, because there is no need for any complex animation. With this it is possible to open and close the doors and rotate the wheels.

Yet I can not turn the front feels in that car, but i am trying to understand how to make it working correctly. Because of that kind of problems, i have been scared for starting to learn the rigging. But now I have started it, here I come!