Glossary

Rigging

Adding a skeleton of bones to a mesh and binding its vertices to it so it can be animated.

A rig is the skeleton inside a character: a hierarchy of bones plus skin weights that define how strongly each bone moves each vertex. Once rigged, a mesh can be posed and animated with keyframes, motion capture or retargeted clips instead of standing still like a statue. A good rig deforms cleanly at shoulders, hips and knees and uses consistent bone names. On Grab3D, selected two-legged characters (such as the samurai, the armored knight and the viking) have a rigged variant created by automatic rigging: a 24-bone humanoid skeleton without finger or facial bones and two in-place clips, walk (1.0 s) and run (0.625 s). The rigged variant has fewer triangles (about 216k–300k), 2K textures and comes as GLB, FBX and .blend. Automatic rigging only works for two-legged figures, so four-legged animals are not rigged.

See also: Retargeting · Topology · FBX

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