With Previs process wrapped up on our animated production, week 7 primary revolved around us learning the fundamentals of rigging characters and assets in Blender. In week 7’s lecture I was introduced to some of the ways to rig and and control object movements in Blender.

The first fundamental that I learned about were empties and how they can be combined and used to create controllers to move an rotate other objects without interfering with said meshes.

After the introduction to the use of empties, the entire class was given a challenge to repair a pre-rigged set of robotic arms which had their controllers all messed up, our task was to identify each problem and repair them, I found this task to be quite challenging at first  but after taking some more time to understand how controllers and rigs function correctly, I was able to finally able to repair it.

The second exercise was even harder, we had to develop a working rig for a water wheel that had been pre-made, The specifications for this exercise included: the Wheel’s rotation had to be controlled by an empty being used as a controller, all the buckets must rotate with the wheel correctly and the entire water wheel can be moved and rotated without the animation being messed up. This challenge was even more difficult and require much more though, trial and error. But eventually I managed to get the water wheel to work correctly with all the requirements. This is still an aspect I want to improve with and get into the habit of using empties to rig objects instead of directly manipulating meshes when animating in Blender.