Before reading this page you should work through the 'Animation Basics' page which explains how to animate an object that is rigid (does not have a posable skeleton or 'armature'). It's much more interesting but rather more difficult to animate a 'rig' (a characters with a posable skeleton) which is the subject of this page.

A rig is a body attached to a skeleton or 'armature', ready to be set into different poses in an animation. We won’t have time to make a very sophisticated character because it is difficult to attach the ‘flesh’ to the bones such that the character behaves realistically set in different poses. Also, we do not know enough about setting up 'constraints' to help control the character. Therefore we will take a look at a ready-made rig called 'Biped'. Download Biped HERE. This file is compatible with blender version 2.57b, the current version as of June 2011.

Important note: Blender has been changing rapidly recently and many older rigs are not compatible with the latest version of Blender (version 2.57b as of June 2011). The rig described and downloadable on this page IS fully compatible with Blender 2.57b. Always try to check the compatibility of a rig with your version of Blender before downloading it.

Biped is perhaps the simplest possible humanoid rig to work with because it has no 'flesh' - Biped is robot-like with rigid parts and therefore it is not necessary to worry about the way flesh behaves in the proximity of joints as the joints bend. Also, Biped has no mouth so there is no question of attempting lip-sync which is a difficult technique that we do not have time for.