Rigging is the process of taking your finished models and preparing them for animation. The playlists featured on this page will show you the CINEMA 4D tools and skills you need to make your characters animation-ready.
Quickstart
If you’re brand new to character rigging and you want to dive in, start here.
Toon Rig Series
Watch Sebastian Pfiefer as he shows you all about the new Toon Rig Preset in Cinema 4D R23.
Injecting Character into Objects in Cinema 4D
Learn how to inject energy and character into objects using Deformers in Cinema 4D!
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The Character Object
The Character Object is Cinema 4D’s built-in auto-rigging system. Bret Bays walks you through the process of rigging your first character. 
Ninja Character Rig
Professional Technical Director Bret Bays shows you how to rig letters for cartoony animation using simple deformers and a bit of XPresso.
Projects
Learn character rigging by creating a project start to finish.
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Face Rig Tutorial
In this series, Can Erduman shows how to create a Face Rig using the new features of Cinema 4D R23 for his short I’Artista.
Biped Rigging
This series covers the creation of a biped character rig from from scratch. You’ll also pick up some useful tips and tricks to make a stable easy-to-control Bipedal rig. Essential for anyone looking at getting beyond simple joint creation, This tutorial looks at how to create a Broken Hierarchy rig including setting up priorities and controls.
Setting Up Hand Controls with Pose Morph
Recorded after the Biped Rigging series, this series introduces a much more efficient method to create and manage hand controls.
Creating a Custom Template
The series covers the process of converting a custom rig into an easily re-usable rig for biped characters of all shapes and sizes.
Weight Painting
Precisely assigning the influence each joint has on each point of your character is essential to good-looking animation. In this series Bret Bays walks you through the weight painting tools found inside CINEMA 4D.
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The PoseMorph Tag
The posemorph tag is an incredibly powerful system for creating transitions, or morphs, between various sets of stored information - which is great for everything from facial animation to simplifying object interaction. This series covers the parameters and functions of the PoseMorph Tag.
Rigging a Surgical Robot
In this series we will go through the steps of rigging a precise surgical machine and showing how to animate it. It will cover different tools like Xpresso, IK chains, and Posemorphs with the interaction tag to complete the ri
Reference
Want to take an in-depth look at Cinema 4D’s character rigging tools? Look no further.
Toolbox
Here you’ll find any useful plugins, scripts, and presets we’ve developed for character rigging.
CV Selection Manager
The CV Selection Manager is a dockable window that displays a list of the selection sets attached to an object. From this list you can rename the selection set, these changes will also be reflected in an texture tags that are being restricted by the selection set. If selection sets are something that you use a lot, then you need this plugin.
Presentations
Inspiring high-level discussions of character rigging from some of the best Cinema 4D artists on the planet.
Character Rigging Techniques - Siggraph 2015 Rewind
Learn how to build a character animation pipeline around Cinema 4D, leveraging the power of the Character object and Python API. In these live presentations from Siggraph 2015, Bret Bays demonstrates how he’s tackled the character technical direction (TD) work for The Ottoman Project, and also explains his process for defining joint weights.