Basics

For the basics, we will go through a simple rigging process, as well as a little tour around the editor.

Table of Contents

• Help Light
• Moving & Zooming the Camera
• Your First Bone
• Parent & Child Bones
• Parent-Child Bone Inheritance
• Pivots & Hinges

Help Light

Upon opening the editor for the first time, you may see a yellow highlight on the New Bone button.

This is intended for those that prefer a hands-on guide within the editor. For the sake of this written guide, let's disable it from Help > Stop Help Light.

Moving & Zooming the Camera

To move the camera, drag the mouse around while holding left click.

To zoom in/out, edit the zoom value in the bottom right, or press the -/+ keys on your keyboard (located to the right of the number keys).

The camera can also be controlled with touchpad gestures (double-swipe to move, pinch to zoom).

Your First Bone

Click the New Bone button on the Armature panel (left side). This will create a new bone as well as automatically select it.

The Bone panel (right side) will show the bone's fields and properties such as position, scale, etc., and can be edited.

The bone can also be edited by dragging the mouse while holding left-click. This will edit the corresponding field that is selected on the top left bar (Move, Scale, Rotate).

Since left-click dragging now moves the bone, the camera can still be moved around with the mouse by holding the Modifier key (CTRL on Windows/Linux, CMD on Mac).

Parent & Child Bones

Your only bone is acting on it's own, but it can also be connected to others to form joints and the like.

Create another bone, and you will see a new Drag button. This will toggle to a mode that allows dragging bones around the list. Drag a bone on top of another and watch it highlight:

Release the mouse, and now you have a parent bone and a child bone!

Switch back to Edit mode (where Drag was), and select the parent bone. As you edit it in any way, the child bone will be affected as well.

Parent-Child Bone Inheritance

Child bones inherit all of their properties from their parent's. This means that if a parent's position is (2, 2), for example, then the bone's position will be it's own, plus (2, 2).

This also means the child bone's properties are relative to the parent. If a child bone's position is set to (0, 0), for example, this will not necessarily position it to the center of the grid. Instead, it will be exactly where it's parent is.

Pivots & Hinges

In addition to the above, child bones inherit a parent's rotation in a way that it's 'orbiting'. This orbiting behaviour allows the parent to act as the pivot point of it's child(ren).

It is good to note that bones do not need a texture and can be invisible, so there is nothing wrong with having a parent bone that only serves the purpose of being a pivot.

Conclusion

By now you have hopefully gotten a good idea of how bones work. Play around wtih them a little more and see what you can make!

Once you are ready, let's start animating it!