[Blender] Game Ready Rigs - Squash & Stretch Solutions
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange answerers and askers point people to it for how to build squash and stretch and separate control and deformation rigs that still export cleanly to game engines.
Recommended by 1 people across 1 different months, 2022 to 2026.
What it is
A 29-minute Blender rigging tutorial from CGDive on handling squash and stretch for game characters. It explains why bone scale distorts characters and walks through two in-Blender solutions, a flat hierarchy and a bone offset technique, plus a hybrid and a test in UE4.
What people said
Recommends Brockoli Bruce · 2022-12 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “IK Stretching Without Deformation”
You'll need an extra deformation bone that has the same location, rotation and only the Y-scale of your stretchy bone. You can do this with a driver as well. I also recommend this video [this video] which will explain more about how squash and stretch rigs can be made in Blender. This person recommends using separate control and deformation rigs, since that's better for games, but it's possible to combine the two like I've done for this post. Rigging can get pretty complex and dependent on circumstances so I'll provide the file so that you can have a look at it and apply what's relevant to your rig. [LINK]
Cites Copperplate · 2022-08 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How to fix Mixamo Rootbaker error message in Blender?”
Prerequisite Step 1: First, if you are using Blender 3.1 - 3.3 or newer, make sure you are using the NEW fork of Mixamo Converter by "brkeejp" on Github ( available here [LINK] ), otherwise the addon will give you a different error message: "NLA_OT_bake.frame_start expected an int type, not float". However, the older Mixamo converter by "enziop" will still work fine up to Blender 3.0.1 only (01-26-2022 release). Prerequisite Step 2: (If you are NOT using a dual-rig system, you can ignore Prerequisite Step 2.) If you are working with a dual rig system (control rig and a game rig as described in CG Dive's YouTube tutorials [this video] ) keep in mind that Mixamo Rootbaker addon will clear your cons
Cites okitsQwerty · 2026-03 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Blender mysterious file size bloat from rig”
[LINK] A 3mb character model I was rigging ballooned to 535mb while rigging. Didn't seem right so I started removing things to see where the file size bloat was coming from. I made a separate file with the model and deleted every single bone from it(CT no bones), got rid of orphan data and it still had .500mb of mysterious unnamed bloat. I tried again and removed all constraints and it still had the 500mb of bloat. I have incrementally saved versions of the model and the bloat seems to have started when I began implementing a game ready squash and stretch setup [this video] . I am a little confused on how the bloat remains even after I removed all constraints and bones though. I was able to make