Every face in a 3D mesh has a normal direction, which defines its “front” side. Blender uses this to determine how light interacts with it, whether it should be rendered, and how textures are mapped.
Front side (normal): Considered the correct side of the face.
Back side: Considered the inside or wrong side—can cause issues if facing outwards. Usually appears in Red.
Step 1: Go into Edit Mode and Select your entire mesh by pressing A, you’ll know when everything is selected when your 3D model turns orange.
Step 2: Now Press Option + N (Mac) or Alt + N (Windows) to open up the Normals Panel and click Recalculated Outside
Alternatively, You can flip normals manually by selecting the faces and then pressing Option + N (Mac) or Alt + N (Windows) and clicking Flip
To make this more simple, I’m going to show you how I would make a simple walking animation with my character, that way you can intuitively create your own animations later on.
Animating a character is kind of like playing with an action figure. You move its body into different poses, and then tell Blender to remember each pose. When you play the animation, Blender connects those poses to make the character move!
What is a Keyframe?
A keyframe, simply put, is a ‘marker’ on a timeline that stores the state of an object’s properties at a specific point in time.
What is a TImeline?
The Timeline is a panel in Blender used to control when things happen in your animation. You can find it at the bottom of your viewport hidden away, all you have to do is hover over the bar click and drag it up!
Step 1: First let’s make sure your rig is resetted.
Select your armature in the hierarchy and switch to pose mode.
Then select your entire armature by pressing A.
Press ALT + R (Windows) or Option + R to reset your rig
Step 2: Animating Positions with Keyframes
To make my character walk, I’ll start by creating a walking pose. I’ll move the arms and legs by selecting the bones and pressing R to rotate them into the right position. To make it easier to rotate, I turned to the side of the character, you should also do this to check if your pose looks right from all angles.
Step 3: Now we want to capture our pose within the timeline as a keyframe.
Make sure your timeline is set at the first keyframe.
Select your entire armature by pressing A.
Then right click on your character and press Insert Keyframe.
You’ll know when you done it correctly when you see a little yellow diamond appear on your timeline.
Step 4: Now let’s move along on our timeline, I’m going to just move to 10 seconds on my timeline by dragging the blue marker, then repeat Step 2 and 3. I’m going to move my bones onto the opposite side and insert another keyframe at 10 seconds.
After you insert the second keyframe, you can now use your blue marker and scroll through the timeline to see your animation!
Step 5: Now let’s create another keyframe at 20 seconds, but this time instead of rigging our character we’re going to copy and paste our previous keyframe to finish the animation loop!
Set your blue marker to 20 seconds
Select your first keyframe at 1 second (you’ll know that you’ve selected it when the keyframe turns orange
Copy with Command + C and paste it with Command + P
This will copy all the data from the first keyframe to our new keyframe at 20 seconds.
Step 6: Check your animation, you want to set your End from 250 seconds to 20 seconds (since thats where our last keyframe is) and then click space to see your animation.
If you want a better view of your character, you can hide the armature in the hierachy by clicking on the eye icon next to it!
Step 7: And you’re all done! If you have any questions or get stuck while animating, feel free to ask for help in the Studio X Discord channel. Feel free to experiment with your animations, and remember to constantly save your progress.
If you’re done animating, and want to learn how to export the animation into Unity, use the Exporting Animations Tutorial.
In Blender, a rig is essentially a skeleton or armature composed of bones that controls a model’s movement. This allows you to animate and pose your model dynamically.
Step 1: In Blender, make sure your character is centered and lined up with the origin. To do this, you want to select your model > press N to open the transform tab > hover over location > and press backspace.
You want to make sure that your character’s origin (the small orange dot on your character is at the center of your model. To do this, you can right-click the model > set origin > geometry to origin.
Step 2: Once you’ve confirmed your model is at the origin center, ensure you’re in Object Mode and click Add > Hover over Armature > and click Single Bone to add a single bone.
Step 3: After adding your single bone, to make editing easier, ensure you’re in viewport shading mode (solid) and that transparency is enabled. After making sure you have selected your armature, return to Edit Mode.
Step 4: Now that we have our armature set up, let’s start at the hip! Since a bone is an object, we can treat it just like the other meshes in Blender. That means we can transform, rotate, and scale them. So move the first bone to the lower half of our character’s torso.
Step 5: Now, let’s name our bone. This is just to keep everything organized for later. To do that, select your bone in edit mode, and drop down to the bone property tab (the green bone) and rename the bone in the name panel to “HipBone”
Step 6: We’re going to name every bone we add to our character. To add a new connecting bone, select the small ball on top of your current bone, then press E to extrude. Make sure to press Z while extruding to keep the bone straight. Now, we’ve created a torso bone.
Step 7: Now, try to make bones for your character’s Head, Body, Arms, and Legs. To add new bones, go to Add > Create a New Bone > and place it where needed. Use the image below as a reference for positioning your character’s bones. Remember to name them!
Step 8: After you finish adding all your bones, we’re going to attach the mesh to the armature. First, make sure your layout is in Object Mode. Then select the mesh first, and then Shift click the armature. Afterwards, press Control P and a pop-up will appear. Find the option “With Automatic Weights” and click it. This will now join both the armature you created on top of your mesh.
After joining your character with automatic weights, you can now access pose mode! Go into pose mode, and try moving around your armature’s bones by clicking on them and rotating them with R.
Weight Painting
Now, after playing with your armature for a bit, you might notice that some parts of your mesh aren’t rigged correctly, and that’s completely fine! We’re going to fix it with a bit of weight painting.
What is Weight Painting?
In Blender, a process assigns varying degrees of influence, or “weight,” to each bone in a character’s armature, impacting the mesh’s vertices. This influence is shown as a color gradient from red (full influence) to blue (no influence), helping artists manage how the mesh deforms as the bones move.
To access the weight painting option, make sure you’re in object mode, then select the mesh and NOT the armature. When you open the mode tab, you will find the weight painting option.
Step 1: Once you enter Weight Paint mode, your mesh will turn blue and show different colors. Focus on the paint options and the tab at the top center of your screen, which displays the names of your bones from earlier.
Weight
Controls how strongly a bone will influence a specific part of the model. A weight of 1 means full influence, while a weight of 0 means no influence at all.
Radius
Controls the size of the brush you’re using to paint weights. A larger radius covers a bigger area, while a smaller radius allows for more detailed painting.
Strength
Adjusts the amount of weight applied each time you paint. A higher strength applies more weight quickly, while a lower strength allows you to build influence gradually.
Step 2: Now you need to decide which part to work on in the weight paint. I’ll show you the head of my character and how I plan to fix the weight paint. For my character’s head, the accessories weren’t automatically applied, so we’ll paint them on. The red indicates where the bone was affected, and the blue isn’t.
Step 3: Now you can adjust your weight, radius, and strength to meet your needs. Set them to 1.0 for weight, 75 for radius, and 1.0 for strength. After adjusting your paint settings, simply click and drag on the blue areas of your model to turn them red.
Now you want to do this for each part of your model that needs adjusting. If you need extra help with this part of the workshop, please use the Studio X Discord and contact an XR Specialist for assistance! Switch between pose mode and weight paint mode to test each of your bones.
Step 4: If you have any questions or get stuck while rigging, feel free to ask for help in the Studio X Discord channel. Remember to constantly save your progress.
Step 2: Select your character’s model by clicking and dragging your mouse.
You will know your character is selected once it is fully outlined in orange.
Step 3: Press the Control and A keys at the same time. Then, select All Transforms.
Explanation
This sets the model’s scale to 1,1,1 and rotation to 0,0,0. This is how Unity expects imported models to be.
Step 4: Ensure Face Orientations are normal. Do this by entering the overlays menu and checking the Face Orientation setting. Your character should now be highlighted in blue (NOTE: In more recent versions of Blender, the blue highlight may not show up).
Move your view around your character and make sure there are no red highlights. If there are red highlights, see the Blender Tutorial How to Fix Face Orientations.
Step 5: While your model is selected, start the .fbx file export by going to File -> Export -> FBX (.fbx).
Explanation
Unity prefers the .fbx file format because it’s a stable, widely supported format that imports consistently, while .blend files rely on Blender’s background conversion, which can cause version or compatibility issues.
Step 6: Edit the export settings as so:
Under Include -> Limit to, check the box for Selected Objects (make sure only your model is currently selected in blender).
Under Include -> Object Types, click the selections while holding the shift key down until only Armature and Mesh are left selected in blue.
Then, select Export FBX.
Step 7: Open Unity, and navigate to the Assets/_Models folder in the project folder. Double click the _Models folder to enter it.
Step 8: Import the .fbx file into Unity by heading to Assets -> Import New Asset...
Then Select your .fbx file and click Import
You should see your .fbx file in the _Models folder. If the .fbx file was placed in a different folder you can simply drag it into the _Models folder.
You will notice that your character’s textured material is not currently applied to your .fbx file. This is normal, and we will import the texture in a later step.
Step 9: Make a new Empty GameObject to hold your NPC model. Click the plus sign in the Hierarchy window, and then click Create Empty.
Rename the GameObject to whatever you like.
Step 10: Drag your model into the empty GameObject.
Step 11: Import the model’s texture.
Navigate to the Assets/_Materials/Textures folder in the project window.
Then, head to Assets -> Import New Asset... and import the .png file of your model’s texture.
Then, click and drag your texture from the project window onto your model in the scene view.
Step 12: Save your NPC as a Prefab by dragging it from the Hierarchy Window into the Assets/_Prefabs folder in the Project Window.
Next Steps:
Follow this tutorial if you would like to have your NPC move around in your experience.
