I think a lot of people have trouble rigging characters and other objects with armatures. I know I find it quite tricky, so I thought I’d start this thread for discourse related to armatures and rigging,…questions, helpful bits of knowledge can accumulate here, and perhaps provide another good reference for both people who are experienced with rigging, and those who are new to it. If you have any rigging tips, or nagging questions about armatures, leave them here, and we’ll all learn something new. 
Good idea.
For those looking for example .blends here are 3 files containing downloadable rigged characters:
http://blenderchar.weirdhat.com/models/blendo.zip
http://www.ualberta.ca/~cwant/blender/reversefoot.zip
http://www.flippyneck.com/wip/flippyneck_character.zip
Personally I find Blender to be perfectly adequate for rigging everything except for arms, where the lack of rotation constraints on bones makes keeping elbows behaving properly a right pain. Anyone got any good tips for correcting this?
I’m having trouble right now. I have been following this tut; http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/blendage/pages/tutorials/tut3/armatures.html
and it looks simple enough, but every time I try to select an armature for renaming,(left circle select, ctrl-right circle select) it does nothing. Repeating crashes it. I have tabbed edit mode on and off, tried boxing the selection, nothing brings the naming box in the lower window. Also I can’t select the mesh, then ctrl-select the armatures(crash). I have vers. 2.28, has it changed since the tutorial? Mabey I am missing a .dll or a plugin.
Help!
First, you have to do that in Edit mode.
Then, try selecting both end of a bone using box select (Bkey).
That should work.
Martin
PS: That method didn’t change since 2.20 and it’s not relelated to a plugin or a DLL.
thax, but I have tied that. I tried again since your post, and got an immediate"illegal action" crash.
Hi, my first post here
Another sample of rigged caracter
http://usuarios.lycos.es/puckplural/imagenes/
Download bip1.zip
Sorry for my bad english %|
I uninstalled 2.28 and reinstalled it (well. 2.23) and now it works fine!
Hi Pucks,
Couldn’t get the zip file… damn GetRight gets a page…
Could you email to me, please?
thanks,
Simon
Working through this tutorial;
http://mmaigrot.free.fr/didac-blender/ikas/ikas-eng/ik-p1.php
I no longer get crashed, but I still can’t get the mesh to move with the armature.
I have the verticies named with the bones,(b1,b2,b3) I select the cylinder, then shift/Rclick the arms, ctrl/p and choose ‘armatures’, yet no mesh movement ! It scales up and down together though. This probably seems simple to you blender veterans, this it is totaly new for me. ( pretty cool though.
).
hi Ric
Are you sure that you have “Assigned” the vertices to the Armature.
I wish Blender could point out to you which vertices were assigned ( if at all ) to which Armatures.
As soon as you click on an armature the vertices would start flashing.
I think Blender should have the option to flash on certain things like this.
One to think about mabey.
Don’t give up on Armatures OK .
I’m doing the same thing as you, well i’m trying to get to grips with IK Solvers to tell the truth.
In my opinion Armatures and Constraints shoulld be one of the first things that should be learnt in Blender if your into making characters.
Weight paint mode… maybe…
Martin
I just got the mesh to move. Only a couple of verticies were properly attached, but my problem was in moving and posing it. Very encouraging. 
O.k., now I have a mesh man and a skeleton of armatures. I can pose and animate better each try. But sometimes when I save the blend file and reload it, it crashes as soon as I try to pose it. I can reload a previous save, parent the mesh to the arms, and it works again, but when I save it again, then reload, crash. Is this a bug ?
Also do the arm armatures and the leg armatures need to connect? Right now they are sepparate just for posing.
Ric they don’t have to be connected as long as you have defined your vertice groups. To keep them in the same position relative to one another, just put an empty in the middle and parent them both to it.
That info was helpfull. But I found part of my problem. When I load a blend file and the first thing I try to do is select an armature and rotate it, it crashes, but if I do something like size change or something else first, then come back to rotate it, it works. Consistent, and very, very wierd . 
The problem is back. I can’t even select an armature to pose it without an “invalid page” crash. Can anyone help me solve this?
edit
Ahhh… I did a search for this problem and didn’t find this exact issue, but tried a related fix and turned off my videos’ hardware acceleration. Problem solved!!! BTW, I have an Intel 810 video card. It has LIMITS! Thanx
General discussion…ok
I’ve been blendering a while now and it seemed time to make my first char->
following quit a lot of tut’s I managed to make one.
The armature that is…with some simple cube’s; I’ve read you should first test your Chars movement with simple objects, for if it does not work…)
afther creating some actions:e.g. Walk, i tested the action with alt-a->
smooth walking.
Then I tried the engine: p-key->
now all the bones from the armature seemed to have moved to the centre of the armature(the root bone).
I didn’t notice it until i went in “wireframe”, being able to “see” all the cubes nicely centered.
I checked and rechecked, tried baking the actions…nothing helps…( tried the knowledgeBase, BlenderChar, Google, littleOTO, various other).
can anyone tell me what i missed…
What version are you using?
2.25 on linux 2.4.20
but after your question I checked 2.23, and same thing…strange…
I do have an even older version, but i beliefe the bones were diffrent then(1.8).
Hi,
I’m just trying to do the gingerbreadman in the ‘old’ new documentation. For disconnected bones belonging to the same armature, something must have changed between the version used in the tut and the way things work in 2.30…
Space>>add>>armature, draw bone, LMB, esc
Stay in editmode, click somewhere else Space>>Add>> ‘Nothing’
WTF?! Anybody noticed this? Workaround? Wait for 2.31?