How to Rig a Mesh (of a Hand) in Blender 2.68

You rig a mesh in Blender by deforming it either with armatures of with vertex keys. I will only discuss the technique using armatures.

The first step, obviously, is to create a mesh. Extrude or subdivide the section that you want to bend (the joint). For the finger, extrude and scale the mesh three times (to create four lines) for the joint.

Place the cursor at the bottom of the mesh you just made, and add an armature (single bone). In Edit Mode, use g to grab the top of the bone and resize it, positioning the top at the middle of the joint. Press e to extrude another bone out of the top of the last one, and make it extend to the end of the mesh.

Next, in Normal Mode, click the MESH first, then shift-click the armature, and press ctrl-p to make the armature a parent for the child mesh.  Select "armature deform" and "with automatic weights" for now. (You can now ctrl-d and move and resize the duplicated things to create multiple fingers, and possibly use a UV sphere to create a palm. Make sure to use ctrl-j to join all the meshes together. RENAME THE NEW BONES.) You can also set X-Ray to on and Names to see the names of each bone and through the mesh.

You can move the bone in Pose Mode to test it. *Use alt-r to reset the bone to its original position*

You probably see issues with the mesh deforming in a random way while moving some of the bones. This is because Automatic Weights has much difficulty choosing which vertices to connect to the bone. This can be fixed in Edit Mode by using the assign and remove buttons to (surprise, surprise) assign and remove different vertices to the highlighted bone. Continue to work with this until the bone moves (slightly) realistically.

To move the finger as a whole instead of posing each individual bone (an exhausting process), use Inverse Kinematics (IK) and Constraints. Select the bone, go to "Bone Constraints" and set "IK Constraint." Change the Chain Length setting to the amount of connected bones you want to move together, and mess with some of the other settings if you're an experienced Blender user. If not, these settings are fine for what you are attempting.

You can now use keyframes to manipulate the bones and make a simple hand animation. Congratulations!

~ Rhiannon Enright

Link to the Video of My Animation