Once your baby dragon is parented to the rig, it finally comes to life and you can move it around the rig to fly, pounce, walk, or anything you can dream of. Weight painting is an intermediate step between building the rig and animating it, where vertices are assigned influence to individual bones. Areas such as the eyes and claws are easy; they'll have a single bone influencing them. The body will be parented with automatic weights and the initial estimate will get you 90% of the way there, as areas such as the elbow blend between the forearm and arm bones. However, we'll also have problems with the initial weights, where the generated weights got them wrong, and a personal touch is needed.
We'll create our first animation to address this—a simple series of movements that stretch the rig's extremes, making it easy to find...