2D Arm Rig - Blender

so in my last video i said i would be taking a closer look at arm rigs and the different things that we can do in blender to animate our arm so the first one i want to take a look at is actually going to be the one based off the object rig that i was talking about in my last video so i've got my uh origin points set to each rotation point and we can quickly just uh use r to rotate that same with the forearm we've got it broken up into arm forearm and the hand we can rotate with the the r hotkey we can also hit g and grab if we feel like that wrist needs to be repositioned if it's breaking the illusion and yeah so that's a quick and easy way to get your arm animated the second arm rig option that i want to talk about is uh similar to the first rig so it is also broken down into arm forearm and hand uh and it's the only one i haven't actually set up yet i'm going to go ahead and show you how easy it is so if you've already got the uh three object pieces that you want and you want to take it further beyond the object mode rig that we've got going on here and you want to be able to use things like the action editor and the pose library what we can do is uh go ahead and add armature single bone and i'm gonna go into edit mode i'm gonna grab the uh the tail end here oh whoops i'm gonna grab the tail end here and i'm gonna bring it down to where it's gonna rotate at the elbow and if you turn on your viewport shading and you may even wanna turn on your uh toggle x-ray here now i can see this uh perfect circle that makes up my elbow and i want to rotate right in the center of that so i'm going to go ahead and pull that to the middle and as you can see this arm was made up of perfect circles so i it would be easier for me to get to rigging so as you can see there is this an imaginary circle that would continue through here so i'm going to line it up to the center of that and then i'm just going to hit e for extrude and extruding at the wrong spot here i'm gonna hit e for extrude and bring it down to the wrist here and just position that at a good rotation point for that and its circle is somewhere around there okay so we've got that set up and uh this is honestly this is how easy it is when you have it broken up into different objects if we go back like i showed you last time into edit and lock object mode lock object modes i guess uh what we can do is we can go into pose mode on the bones oh you know what i need to make a hand bone i do apologize e for extrude on that and then what i like to do is i like to clear the parent and then we can re-parent it and keep offset and that's going to allow me to rotate it at the rotation point whoops go into pose mode it's gonna allow us to rotate it at the rotation point but also allow us to reposition it and uh we're gonna click on our hand or you can even click it up here and we're gonna hold shift click on our hand bone and we can go ahead and parent that as a bone all right so we are set up there i'm gonna go ahead and lock that back for my object modes and i'm gonna reposition the origin to geometry just so it's not floating away out there okay so we oh we can actually just repeat that process so i'm gonna unlock that and parent the forearm and the arm would probably be useful [Music] and as above okay so now we have this parented and set up we can go ahead and re-lock our object modes and now we can actually easily and quickly start animating this similar to how we would in object mode now you can rotate this you can also hit grab it'll do the same thing since it is a connected bone but now what we can do is we can come over here to our bone constraints and we can add inverse kinematics and we can set our chain link to two because we want to be this bone in this bones the two bones and now we can just hit grab and position just the forearm and the arm's going to follow and that's going to make animating a lot more intuitive so let's take a look at the next rig so if i go back into object mode this one is already set up and it's based off of the lattice so it's one object we go ahead and open up the folder here it's one grease pencil object and we've got one lattice and everything's connected so the lattice has got the armature modifier linking back to the armature here and the gris pencil object has the lattice modifier of course linking back to the lattice object and uh this is actually being bent by the lattice so it's one object it's being bent uh i've got something ridiculous like 30 subdivisions right because the the more that you have the less it's gonna here i'll show you let me just open it up and go into pose mode all right so in pose mode we can see how this rig is going to bend and it's actually it's not too bad if we go ahead and open up or remove our overlays we can see what it's actually doing now it is not perfect um i think we could make this look a little better if we come into our arm and i think if we put our fill over top our lines that is actually going to clean that up quite a bit so let's take a look at that [Music] much cleaner right so there's a there's a lot of things that we can do in blender we're not limited to just one way or one idea now you can see how we can change the way this bends in the lattice so let's go back into object mode click on our lattice uh we've got it starts off on b spline and to see that i'm gonna go ahead and hide the lattice to see that we have to keep going back into pose mode but this is another time maybe you want to unlock object modes and yeah see that looks real nice i don't know what this bone is here let me go ahead and delete that it's not leading to anything [Music] okay so yeah no that's bending quite nice and yeah so we can choose different uh bending methods i suppose you could say so that's b spline we've also got uh catmull rom here which flattened out that elbow and it does less deformation of the forearm and the arm so they're not gonna get skinnier as you go to bend it like it does with b-spline or maybe it looks a little cleaner to you i don't know it depends this is all uh preference there's no right or wrong on these settings here uh cardinal kind of flattens out the elbow a bit let's see your catmull rum of course so yeah you just go through here you choose maybe you like that really harsh elbow i think i'm gonna keep that i don't know but yeah so that's a quick easy a nice dirty way to get that going of course this will break at some point it's not perfect but it is a quick way to just kind of get a concept character throw a lattice over them and then you can not worry about drawing each piece of the arm separately so let's go ahead and move on to the final rig option that we have and now this is the rig that my last video was based on so what we have is one arm object but it is separated into different layers and we've got it parented through the relations tab now it does take a little longer to set this up and there are more issues with it but what we are able to do is uh let me go ahead and hide this actually i'm gonna go ahead and hide everything except for the lines now if you look at just the strokes what we have are two overlapping strokes and what we're able to do is we're able to put our fill on top of both of those so that's hiding our overlapping lines of course i do have my stroke my stroke fill here that's going to finish hiding that now when we go to bend this it's nice and clean we've got uh where it would break you can see that it's slightly overlapping each other and that's because the puppet lines are behind the fill so this is a quick way to hide those lines make things nice and clean and it doesn't necessarily have to be perfect this i choose to typically do it this way because obviously the elbow is a lot cleaner you can choose to have your forearm over it's just going to work a lot nicer it's a little harder to set up but there is one more thing that we can do and why i like this method so we can go over here and turn on my detail now this is all this is is my forearm stroke duplicated and i brought it forward and i can even show you how i did it here i'll go ahead and take the time to clear out my pose [Music] so all i did was i took my forearm stroke i duplicated it i'm going to bring that above right under the sleeves stroke and the sleeve fill but right above everything else for the arms i'll lock everything else so i don't make a mistake here now going into edit mode we can go ahead and break this filled in vertice and we only do that because it won't allow you to erase if it's completely put together so i'm going to go ahead and just start erasing i'm going to do it to taste and this is if you want detail lines to show that the forearm is indeed in front it's really good for i think front facing views to kind of really give it that direction so and all i did other than that was i mean this is already done so if we go into pose mode on our armature oh whoops we go into pose mode on our armature that's already done it's there uh it's not super clean now what i did to clean that up even further if we go into edit mode but not on our bones if we click into object mode and we go into edit mode on our arm you can take these points and with our radius tool here we can just kind of just kind of to taste right we can taper that off to where it's more of a detail line and it's obvious that that's what it is we have the background puppet lines without that to uh catch it if it if it breaks the illusion so those are still there and yeah this is i think possibly the best way to set up your arm rig it's all still contained within uh one grease pencil object so you don't have you know three four objects for one because you i mean technically you could just copy the uh case you could copy the forearm and bring it forward and position it that way but then you have more grease pencil objects to then add modifiers to i've also thought about playing with maybe uh having it broken up into the arm and forearm and then using two lattices that way we can also go into edit mode and just sort of play around with that we have shape keys and there's different things that we can do to shift perspective so yeah that's all i've got on arms for today in arm rigs if this was helpful for you go ahead and hit that like and subscribe button and yeah i'll see you next time

Channel: Devin Cobb

Views: 940

Keywords: blender, grease pencil, blender 2d rig, 2d rig, 2d animation, blender grease pencil, full rig, time offset modifer, lattice modifier, animation, cartoon, how to make a cartoon, blender tutorial

Id: 2J7-kM5rkHM

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021