Rigging and Animating in Blender

Rigging

Rigging is a relatively simple process, but it can be a bit tedious. I will roughly guide you through the parts that matter for this workflow, but I still heavily recommend watching a proper Blender rigging guide first.

One short guide I found useful:
Rigging for impatient people - Blender Tutorial

The basic idea is simple:

• create an armature,
• place bones where the joints should be,
• parent your image planes to those bones,
• optionally set up constraints / IK to make animation easier.

Placing Bones

Initially, I recommend placing your bones while looking from the Y axis/front view. Get them positioned “close enough”. It does not need to be perfect. You just want the joints to be in places that make sense.

For a humanoid character, you probably want bones for things like:

• torso
• waist / pelvis
• neck
• head
• upper arms
• lower arms
• hands
• upper legs
• lower legs
• feet

You may also want extra bones for important objects, such as weapons, backpacks, tools, tails, or other large accessories.

For weapons or other held objects, I recommend keeping their bones separate at first instead of directly parenting them into the arm chain. You can later “attach” them to the hand through bone constraints.

This is not mandatory, but it can make your life nicer later. For example, if you want the character to drop their weapon when they die, it is much easier if the weapon has its own separate control/bone setup. You can fix this retroactively, but it usually involves a slightly hacky approach and kind of sucks.

Adjusting the Bones

After the rough placement, adjust the bones so they roughly align with the character joints along the depth axis.

Again, it does not need to be perfect. It just needs to be close enough that rotations look reasonable when animated.

At this stage, your character may look slightly janky and possibly like they have scoliosis. That is fine. This is mostly just the base pose that your animations will start from.

You can think of this as the character’s rough idle/rest pose.

Before moving further, this is a good time to check:

• Are the joints in places that make sense?
• Are the arms and legs easy to pose?
• Are important props separate?
• Does the front view still look correct?
• Are the bones named clearly?

Good bone names make animation much easier later.

Examples:

• upper_arm_L
• lower_arm_L
• hand_L
• upper_arm_R
• lower_arm_R
• hand_R
• weapon
• head
• torso

Avoid names like:

• Bone
• Bone.001
• Bone.002
• thing
• control_final

Parenting Parts to Bones

For most rigid cutout parts, you do not need complicated weight painting.

A lot of pieces can simply be parented to a bone. This works well for parts that should move as solid pieces, such as hands, weapons, head, armor pieces, and most body segments.

For simple rigid parts, the usual idea is:

1. Select the image plane.
2. Select the armature/bone.
3. Parent the object to the bone.
4. Test rotating the bone to make sure the part follows correctly.

The exact Blender steps depend on how you set up your armature, so I recommend looking up a basic “parent object to bone” guide if you have not done it before.

For this workflow, the important thing is that most parts are not meant to deform. They are mostly flat cutout pieces that rotate and move.

Inverse Kinematics

This is technically optional, but it will make your life much nicer when animating.

Inverse Kinematics, or IK, lets you move one control bone and have Blender automatically solve the remaining bones in the chain. Instead of manually rotating the upper arm and lower arm every time, you can move the hand control and let Blender figure out the bend.

I strongly recommend setting up IK for:

• arms
• legs
• tails
• tentacles
• other annoying multi-part chains

This is useful for pretty much all the animations you will be making.

Once again, there are plenty of guides for this online, but if you are comfortable “just sending it”, this short one was useful to me:
Blender 2.8 Inverse Kinematics In 2 Minutes!

Animating

This section will not teach animation from scratch. Instead, it covers habits that make the animations easier to use later in Godot / StS2.

Use the Correct Animation Names

Use the correct animation names from the start. This makes the later Godot setup much less annoying.

You do not necessarily need all of these immediately. I recommend starting with idle, since it will probably be the easiest animation to make, and your other animations will transition to and from it.

Animations you probably want:

• idle
• attack
• cast
• hurt
• die

Depending on your setup, the exact names may be different. The important thing is that the animation names in Blender, Godot, and your code/mapping all agree.

Idle Loop

Your idle animation should be able to loop forever without an obvious pop.

The easiest way to do this is to make your starting pose, then copy it to the end of your timeline. Afterwards, add a keyframe in the middle that slightly moves the main body up and shifts the limbs a little.

You can also add a small twist to the torso or head, but I would keep it subtle. Small motion can make your character feel more alive, but too much can become distracting.

Your animation will probably look stiff at first, but that is what interpolation options are for. You can experiment with them, and you may need to mix different interpolation types between different parts.

The most useful ones for me were:

• Bezier
• Sinusoidal
• Back

A super quick guide: Idle Animations so easy your GRANDMA can do them. (blender tutorial)

Attack and Cast Animations

For StS2-style combat, the animation should clearly communicate what the character is doing and should feel snappy.

Because of that, I would not worry too much about perfectly smooth transitions inside the action animation itself. Instead, position your rig where it needs to be on the first frame, do the important motion quickly, usually over something like 3–5 frames, and then add a brief transition back to a roughly neutral position.

The ending is not as important as the action itself, because Godot animation trees can smoothly transition between animations.

An attack animation is good for physical attacks, melee swings, gunshots, or anything that should feel like a direct hit.

A cast animation is useful for skills, powers, commands, remote effects, or anything that does not really look like a physical attack.

Keep Animations Short

You usually do not need super long animations.

Long animations can look cool, but they can also make the character feel slow or awkward in combat. For most actions, a short readable animation is better than a long overly detailed one.

I recommend getting the timing right first and then polishing it further.

Exporting

Exporting is pretty straightforward, but I recommend keeping the files organized.

I recommend something like this in your mod project:

• myCharacter
  • scenes
    • models
      • character

Export your character model into the character folder.

For the actual export, use the glTF 2.0 format. The default settings should work fine for this workflow.