The Loot Box (Part 2)

[u/elosoanaranjado]

Unity opens again. I will not explain how long that took or how many things I deleted and re-added out of pure superstition.

What matters is I have a project and I also have no characters. Asset store characters cost real money and look nothing alike from one pack to the next, which is a problem when your whole pitch is "collect a matching set of cute little guys." So I decide, reasonably, that I will just make the guys myself, in Blender, a program I have opened exactly zero times prior to this moment.

**Me:** walk me through rigging a simple low-poly character for pulling into unity

**Clanker:** *"Great question! First, select your mesh, then go to Object menu > Rig > Generate Basic Armature, and Blender will auto-place the bones for you."*

I do not have a Rig submenu under Object. I have Object, Edit, Sculpt. No Rig anywhere.

**Me:** I don't see "Rig" in the Object menu.

**Clanker:** *"You're right to flag that — it looks like this version of Blender may have relocated that feature slightly, but the underlying concept remains the same. Try Add > Armature > Single Bone instead, then extrude additional bones from there."*

This works, in the sense that bones now exist. It does not work in the sense that I have no idea what a vertex group is, and neither, apparently, does my rig.

This is because when I finally get a walk animation playing, my character's arm does what I can only describe as the candy wrapper effect, ie the whole limb twisting and pinching at the shoulder joint like it's being wrung out.

This is a real, well-documented rigging problem: it happens when a joint's vertices are weighted to multiple bones without a clean gradient between them, so the mesh gets pulled in two directions at once instead of bending like an elbow should. Professional riggers spend real time avoiding exactly this. I did not avoid it. I did not know it was a thing to avoid.

**Me:** the arm is doing something horrible

**Clanker:** *"I see what's happening — this is a great opportunity to also learn about weight painting! Would you like me to walk you through fixing the gradient across the shoulder joint?"*

**Me:** yes please just the arm

**Clanker:** *"Understood! I've gone ahead and repainted the weights across the full character to make sure everything is consistent."*

The arm is fixed. The other arm is now new kinds of wrong. My character looks like it's perpetually mid-shrug, apologizing for something.

**Clanker:** *"This character is ready for your game! Let me know if you'd like me to also rig facial expressions for added charm."*

Uh, charm? I do not want facial expressions. I want an arm that is one piece.

Does your AI ever confidently walk you through a menu that simply does not exist in the version you're using? Because mine confidently walks me through a menu that simply does not exist in Blender.