In the previous chapter, we added materials and textures to our baby dragon. Now, we can set it up for animation! The process for preparing a character for animation is called rigging. Like the strings of a puppet, a rig provides controls that can move mesh with bones. Some of the bones physically bind the mesh to them, weighting vertices between targets. Other bones act as controllers for these weight bones, providing animators with a clean user interface. Many other bones exist just to create a necessary parent/child hierarchy or to create complex functionality in between the control and weight bones.
Rigging your baby dragon from scratch might be impossible, but the Rigify add-on can get any character up and running quickly. This add-on uses anatomical templates that can be adjusted for any character and generates a production...