 In this video, we'll be introducing basic ideas and concepts used in rigging. We will also, however, be going into detail about each step in separate videos. Rigging is a fundamental step for going from static models to animated characters. Without rigging, you would only be able to move and animate objects as a whole. But what is rigging exactly? Well, the broad definition of rigging in CG can be described as the act of assigning relationships between objects so that moving one thing will move another. This can be seen in the very basic example of parenting one cube to another. For example, by assigning a parent-child relationship between these two cubes, you can move the parent cube and the child cube will follow. But you can also create more complex relationships with the help of constraints and armature objects. Constraints are powerful and flexible relationships that can be assigned between two objects. Beyond the basic parent-child relationship. With constraints, for example, you can add a copy location constraint to our cube to copy the location of our light object, while also adding another copy location constraint to copy the location of our camera object. This creates a stack of constraints just like modifiers, so stack order matters. So then you ask, what are armatures? In CG, the word armature is just another word for skeleton. Skeletons, in real life, are made up of bones, which serve as the foundation of how our bodies move and bend. Skeletons in CG are also made up of bones and do the same thing. Allow me to demonstrate real quick. You can download this character from the description down below. So let's say we have a character that looks like this, and you want to start animating it. If you want to move, rotate, or scale the character, only the whole character will move, kind of like a statue. In order to move the character like a character, you would need to, at the very least, be able to bend its joints individually. So let's demonstrate that with the arm real quick. If we simply add an armature and go into edit mode, we will be able to extrude and place our bones within our mesh according to where we might expect bones in real life. This includes the upper arm, the forearm, and the hand, for example. Once we're happy with that, we can go back into object mode and parent our mesh to the armature object with automatic weights. Weights are how you assign certain vertices to certain bones. And as we can see, selecting and transforming the armature will allow us to deform each arm bone individually, except that it doesn't. That's where we introduce pose mode. Pose mode is the mode where you'll be able to select and transform each individual bone to deform your mesh. These bones can be animated individually and each have their own rotation and location values. Now, in case you feel like the vertices assigned to each bone aren't fully accurate, you might want to adjust the weights. To do this, simply select the mesh and go into weight paint mode. This will allow you to paint your weights, letting you better control how you want the mesh to be deformed. For extra control, you'll be able to add bone constraints to your bones, allowing you to form relationships between bones and objects to make animation easier. For example, having one bone point to another bone to form a simple controller. But what's a controller? Well, a controller is just a bone that doesn't deform the mesh directly, but rather is used to drive other bones in some way. Most of the time, they exist solely to make it easier and more intuitive for the animator to use the rig. We'll go over each of these concepts in separate videos. So I hope this introduces you to the basic concept of rigging, what it is and how it works.