 So, you need to pose your animated character and you don't know how. Not a problem. Now, in this tutorial, I'm going to show you the entire rigging process for this monster anime that I'm using in my game. But for this video, let's try something new. If this is your first time rigging, don't follow along. I just want you to watch. Your goal should be to understand the general process of what I'm doing. This video is short and you can always re-watch it later if you want to follow along then. For now, just sit back, relax, watch and learn. Okay, so generally I start out by separating the model into its main parts. So the head is one object, the spine is another, here's the base and finally the legs. From here, when the mesh is ready, shift A to add an armature and start building your skeleton. Now, immediately I notice that it's hard to see the bones. So to change that, I go back over here and check in front, which allows me to see the bone through the body. Then we just move it to where the spine starts, S to size it and E to extrude some more spine bones. Three should be enough and from here, press E to extrude some more bones for the leg and one extra bone for the IK handle that will control the foot. We don't need the bone that connects the leg to the base so we'll delete it and the foot IK should not be parented to anything. At this point, I usually start naming the bones so I'm just going to call this leg 0, leg 1, leg 2 and IK. Now I'll go to pose mode and click the last leg bone, shift click the IK handle and shift I to add an IK constraint. Awesome. Now since we got one leg done, we'll just select all the bones, set pivot to coarser and duplicate them for another leg. Now anytime you have things that are the same on the left and right side, always mirror them over. In order for the mirror to work, you have to make sure that they're named correctly. So we'll add the word right to each leg bone. Then select them all, right click and symmetrize. Awesome. Okay well the skeleton is almost complete and it seems to be functioning properly. Now we should make sure the legs are parented to the spine, but before we do that, I'm going to make sure that all the spine bones are named correctly. Then under relation to set the parent of each leg to spine 0, if we go to pose mode and test it now, it looks like the legs follow the spine just as they should. Alright. Now that the skeleton is done, it's time to connect it to our model. Generally, if it's not going to bend or deform, instead of weight painting, I prefer the parental approach. So I'm going to parent the head to the top bone and I'm going to parent the base to the bottom bone. If we test it now, you can see that those parts now follow the correct bones. For the spine, if we just use blender's automatic weight paint feature, it usually does the job. We'll do the same thing for the legs and if we test it now, the legs now bend with the bones. And that's cool, but I've noticed something that we don't want, which is the legs seem to be controlling each other and that's because we need to adjust the chain length on the IK constraint. So if you go to modifiers and if you change the length to two, you'll see that only the last two bones are effective. We have three bones, so we'll set it to three. And if that works, I'll set chain to three on every leg. Something else that I'm noticing is the leg bones are affecting the stinger at the bottom, but we just want the stinger to be controlled by the bone closest to it, which is spine zero. So I'll click the skeleton, shift click the mesh, then in weight paint mode, just hold control, select the bone I need and just to make it easier to see, I usually just hide the stuff that's in the way and then left click everything I need until it's red. Okay, awesome. Now if we test the legs again, they no longer affect the stinger. Okay, well, the rigging is basically complete, but it's always a good habit to organize your things before you finish. So what I like to do is go to viewport display and change the bone style to stick because it's much easier to see them that way. And then I'll try and isolate the control bones because the only bones I'll ever need when animating are the foot IKs and the spine. So everything else can move to a different layer. So if I select the bones that I don't need, press M and click the second dot over here, now you can see that all the non-controller bones are in this second layer while all the control bones are in the first layer, which makes it way easier to animate because now only the control bones are visible. Last, it's always a good idea to color coordinate your bones. To do that, go to bone groups, create a new group, name it right side, and I'm going to set the color to red because it's easy to remember that red bones are on the right side. To apply a group color, just click assign and all the selected bones will now be that color. And we'll make another group for the left side and we'll just make it green because I don't know lime green, whatever. It's the opposite of the right side. Last, I'll make a third group for anything in the middle. Usually the color for that is yellow and you're done. Of course, you can always add more, but that's just about everything you would need on a rig for this kind of character. Leave a comment down below if you want to see me rig a more complicated character, but really, all rigging generally follows this kind of workflow. So thanks for watching. Hope that helps. And as always, hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.