

With the armature still selected, find the In Front check box in the Viewport Display section of the Object Properties tab and check it. You’ve now created the armature and its first bone, also known as the “root bone”. Next, select Armature to add the first bone. Now add a new armature by holding Shift and pressing A to open the Add Menu.


Hover over the 3D View to bring it into focus. An armature has bones to which you can connect vertices, so they move along whenever a bone gets moved around. Rigging is the art of creating an armature, the skeleton of the model. Time to get to work! The first step to animating this character is rigging it. The right side of Blender has a simple texture image loaded: This will make the whole process a lot easier along the way. Note that it’s mirrored on the X-axis, meaning its left and right side are identical.

Nowadays, most game engines come with a system to allow reusing animations as long as the skeletal hierarchy is compatible. As an amusing example, the older FIFA games had players all be the same size because creating a separate skeleton - and a set of animations - would have been a nightmare. This limited character diversity as their height and proportions had to be the same as well. In the past, characters needed to have the exact same skeleton to share animations. Update note: Eric Van de Kerckhove updated this tutorial for Blender 3.0 and Unity 2020.3 LTS.Īrtists create 3D characters for your favorite games with the use of models, textures and animations.
