 Character rigs are definitely the most common type of rig. So in this video, we'll be going over how to rig this character mesh. You can download this base mesh in the description down below. So to start things off, if we want to create a humanoid skeleton for this character, we'll have to think about what bones we need to deform him. Let's see, we would need thighs, shins, feet, upper arms, forearms, heads, a head bone, several spine bones. Maybe color bones? This seems like a lot to keep track of if we're doing it from scratch. Luckily, Blender provides a basic humanoid skeleton for you already. Let's figure out how to access it. Normally, when you add an armature object from the add menu, the only choice you have is the single bone that spawns when you click it. However, we can turn on a native add-on that lets us add an armature like usual, but gives us the option to have the armature come as a pre-made base human skeleton. To do this, all we have to do is go to Edit, Preferences, Add-ons. From here, we can go to the search bar and search Rigify. Rigify is one of Blender's auto rigging systems and can be very powerful, but we'll get into that later. For now, we want to simply turn on Rigify. Feel free to read up on the documentation of any add-on by clicking its respective documentation button here. Let's close out of our Preferences window and try again to add an armature object. This time, you'll notice that we have an additional menu when selecting armature. Feel free to try all of these out because they're pretty cool. However, for our purposes, since our character is a human, we're going to be using the Human Meta Rig. Our next step is to simply match the joints with how we want the character mesh to bend. In other words, elbows should match with elbows and hands should match with hands, etc. For this, we'll need to go into Edit mode. Once in Edit mode, we're going to want to first match the size of our character. Right now, it's a bit big, so let's scale it down a bit. But when we do that, it's a bit disappointing to have the rig move up off the ground when it was already at perfect floor level. So we can simply change our pivot from Median to 3D Cursor. Hotkey users can press the period key and select it from the Pi menu. Now, when we scale, we can have the feet stay in place while the rig gets shorter. Just what we wanted. If this isn't working for you, make sure your 3D cursor is in your World Origin. You can change that by hitting Shift-S and selecting Cursor to World Origin in the Pi menu. Let's just scale it down until our skeleton fits inside of our character. I typically use the collar bones as reference. We also have a bunch of facial bones that we won't really need for our basic character. So let's delete them. But which ones can we delete and which ones do we need? Truthfully, the only bone you'll need here is the head. So let's just select everything here with the box select tool and then deselect the head bone, which is actually labeled spine.006. Then delete all the facial bones at once. From here, our arms are clearly not matching. So I'm going to select the bones and move them where they belong. But you might find this a bit tedious to do for the whole body. Luckily, however, we only need to do it for half the body. To mirror edits you make on the bones on one side of your character, onto bones on the other side, simply open the right hand side menu and go to Tool. Under here you'll see options where you'll be able to enable x-axis mirror. Now, whenever you move a bone on the left side, the right side will follow. Let's continue matching our rig to our mesh. For this, it might be easier to turn your pivot point back from 3D cursor to median point. The most important thing about matching your rig to your mesh is that the elbows and other similar joints match. For the spine, we'll simply make sure that it follows the general location of where a real spine would be. And for the head, we just need to make sure the pivot point is good and it fills the whole head. The collar bones should also not be too long or too short, so adjust accordingly. Now, our character has no fingers except for the thumb. So we can go ahead and get rid of all the fingers except for the thumb, the index finger, and the pinky. Oh, and technically if your character is male, you can delete the breast bones if you like. Or you can leave them in if you plan to use them in some way, up to you. But if you do, make sure those have proper placement as well. Now that we've done all of that, let's parent our character mesh to our rig. We can do this by going back into object mode, selecting our mesh, then shift selecting our armature. From here, we can right click and go down to parent. Hockey users can still press Ctrl P for the same menu. From this submenu, you'll notice a section labeled armature deform, under which we can select with automatic weights. From there, we can select our armature and go into pose mode. This will allow us to test the rig and see if the mesh is following the bones as intended. Now, if you're like me and you forgot to parent the eyes to the armature as well, just select it, shift select the armature and parent it in the same way. It looks pretty good. If there are any issues with the deformation, make sure to correct the weights by editing the vertex groups of the character mesh. You can learn more about how to do this in the separate vertex groups video. Now, some of you might be wondering why it's called a meta-rig. This seems to imply that it's sort of an in-between step for something else. Well, while the Rigify add-on does provide these meta-rigs for easy humanoid skeleton rigging, that's not all it does. In fact, its main purpose is to automatically generate all of the advanced rigging features an animator might need, including IK, FK, custom bone shapes, and more. So, while we can use the meta-rig as an actual rig just like we did earlier, if you wanted to use the meta-rig for generating a new advanced rig instead, there's just one extra step we need to do. To go over the steps from the beginning again, simply add the human meta-rig, or any Rigify meta-rig actually, to your scene. Then adjust the joints in edit mode to match your character, making sure not to delete any vital bones. If you were to, the Rigify generation would not work. You might be asking, how do I know if it's a vital bone? Well, if you're unsure, just reference the basic human meta-rig. Any bones in this rig, save for the breast bones, are typically essential for generating a Rigify rig. Now, instead of parenting your mesh to the armature, simply go into the Armature Data tab, denoted by this green stick figure icon in the Properties Editor. Here, if you scroll down, you should see a large Generate button. Click this and wait until it's done. And there we go! You have just generated an advanced Rigify rig with constraints, custom bone shapes, and other advanced tools all customized to fit your character's shape and size. From here, you can just select your character mesh and Shift-Select your new Rigify armature and parent your mesh to your rig as you did before. This rig is quite powerful. However, if you want to learn how to set up inverse kinematics or bone layers yourself, we will address these in separate videos. I hope this video gives you a good understanding of how character rigging works in Blender.