2D Character Rig - Blender

so i've been doing a lot of work in blender lately and i've been pretty impressed with the 2d animation capabilities so i thought i'd go ahead and make this video to share this uh two-dimensional character rig that i've got going on here so if we go into the armature and go into pose mode we can see that i've got uh inverse kinematics set up i've got the full character turn around with the body set up as well separate face control if i want him to just sort of give a nod we've got a eye control rig here so we can simulate a blink or we can even rotate them to make the character look angry there's you know there's a lot of things that we're able to do with that we can keyframe those in we've also got and we'll go ahead and turn off the overlay so you can see this uh we've also got mouth shapes in here and that's set through a bone driver that we can then run through rhubarb so i'm gonna go ahead and run through everything that i've got set up for this character rig and show you how you can build one that's similar so here's a copy of that character that i was just showing you and on a very basic level let's talk about setting the points of origins for your object so if you go over here to your overlays and check on origins i think it's off by default for 2d animation but select on origins and then go ahead and select on 3d cursor and then we can actually by selecting our object right clicking uh holding shift and right clicking we can see that we are actually setting up our 3d cursor to be the point of origin and that's where i actually want this to rotate i'm going to turn on my screencast keys here for you i think that'll be a little uh easier for you to see what's going on so i'm going to right click set origin to and set origin to 3d cursor and we can actually go ahead and do this for each object and if you don't need to set up inverse kinematics or in a full character rig you can also have each of your limbs uh or rotation points and even i guess your forearm and your arms your shins and your thighs all if they're all in different objects then you can set the rotation point by putting the origin here and then you can see that we're able to even rotate that and then we can follow the hierarchy by parenting the foot to the legs compare that as an object same thing over here this foot to this leg parent it as an object same with the hands parent as object parent as object and you can see actually i'm going to choose my head and my hair apparently to the body and you can see that when i rotate my arm my hands follow and that's a quick way to get your character set up and uh riggable but we're gonna talk about actually adding armature and all that so i'm gonna select everything and i'm to remove the parent whoops clear the parent out and you can see i've got my character in his own folder and within that folder i've got a folder just called grease pencil for all my grease pencil objects and the first thing to a complicated rig on grease pencil i guess would be to add lattices in i'm going to add five different lattices so i'm going to hit shift a i'm going to add in a lattice and the thing with lattices is you have to manipulate them in object mode if you try to any edits that you do in edit mode will reflect the object that's parented to it so i'm going to start with my uh my body and i'm gonna get that positioned and i'm gonna go ahead and hide my probably just one leg and one or my in my head i guess one leg in my head so i can see and make sure that everything is around the body in a way that it should be that's perfect and then if i click on my x i can see that it's actually weight fatter than my character is so i'm going to go ahead and scale that in i can scale it in quite a ways it's a flat object so it doesn't need to be much so perfect so we have our body object inside of our lattice and then to parent that all we have to do is i'm going to make a new lattice folder actually inside of my eddie folder and i'm going to call this body lattice and i'm going to put that in my lattice folder just to stay organized i like to be organized i'm gonna go ahead and uh add some subdivision so if i click on my little lattice tab here under the w i'm gonna i'm gonna do like seven of them i think is good and i'm gonna go ahead and copy this over so i need the other lattices i'm gonna do are actually for my face object so if i look into my head here i can see i've got two eyes one nose and one mouth those are each going to get a loudest object and that's because i'm going to pair the head object to a different bone than what's going to control the face and when i did this on a layer level in the grease pencil object so you can also go to the relations tab under like nose for example and parent it that way when i did that i went to move my rig in object mode and i was getting movements from my my face as well so my face control bone that'll make more sense as we get closer to it so i'm going to go ahead and finish making my lattices here so i'm going to scale this down to [Music] be about eye i sized move it over there we'll call this this will be for the left eye i guess and i'll call that l i then shift d copy that over and then rename that ri and then copy it down to the nose scale that in call it no and then one more again just for the mouth so we've got lattices all set up here pretty quick and easy to get that going um and that's all in a separate folder so right now uh we've got our lattices we got our objects there's one more thing we need to do before we start connecting things together and that's to create the armature so i'm gonna go ahead and uh set my origin here just somewhere easy around the pelvis i guess i'm gonna shift a armature and just do a single bone i haven't done uh much experimenting with rigify i do have that installed um i'm not sure if there's any benefits to using rigafi on 2d animation [Music] rig but uh if anybody knows about that i would love to hear about it in the comments and uh yeah so i'm just basically i'm creating different bones here and um for the body i'm gonna match it along the lattice here so the pelvis bone actually needs to the tail of it needs to be down here and that's gonna connect step through this one and then the abs are through here the chest through here and then the neck being around the chin is where i want to rotate so from here i'm going to hit e and just keep extruding and i'm going to create bones for each object that i need just by hitting e and extruding this along and really if you're looking to add a rig it's not that hard but it gets a little complicated i guess when you start adding things like lattices and i think that's why videos like this they they are unnecessary they're very helpful so from the bottom of the pelvis bone here is where i extrude up from my legs these are going to get deleted and i'll show you that here in a second but uh they're really just to go ahead and inherently create it with that parrot so we've got everything parented here all the bones are created there's a few more bones that we need to create and uh that's just for our offsets so we need one for face control one for our head offset and then one for our body offset so i'm going to create three bones over here and then we'll create one more over here and this is for our mouth offset and the next thing we got to do and this is a tedious not very fun at all but we need to name all these bones and that's just going to help keep us organized and it's just going to help things make sense as we as we move further in our rig so for these three this one i'm going to call uh face control because that's going to control the various layers to our face this one i'm going to call head offset or head turn whichever you want to call it that's basically what it's going to be and this one's body offset and lastly we have our mouth offset now this is this is all the bones now this will be all the bones that you saw on the rig earlier this is everything i had and it's enough to definitely get you going with uh inverse kinematics and using the pose library and all of that so now we have everything there but of course nothing is connected nothing's really parented together i move my bone rig and the body doesn't follow so with the uh the limbs we'll start with the limbs because they are more difficult we come here and we type in our armature and we inherent that uh the first thing you're going to notice right away is that it didn't necessarily work and the reason why that is is because there's a sort of a bug in grease pencil when you're parenting on a layer level uh you need to have a type here first if there's not if it doesn't already say object here it won't do anything and if that happens to switch that to object then you can choose your armature then you can switch it to bone and you can choose the bone that you want there is and one more thing that i want to make apparent before we continue is if we go now here our sleeve should be rotating with our with our forearm bone now you can see it's rotating very strangely and the reason why that is is because uh there's another bug in grease pencil adding uh relations using the relations tab to add your armature and that is you need to make sure all of the transformations are applied or it won't rotate correctly so i'm going to take my arm here i'm going to hit ctrl a and i'm going to hit a to apply all transformations now what that does is it sets your origin back to zero it's back at the zero zero zero you know it's been reset but it also applied anything weird in object mode that maybe uh your grease pencil didn't like so my arm is everything's been applied i don't know how to explain it better than that i guess i don't know why it can't override anything like that or maybe even apply for you those transformations but now that we've done that we can go in here parent everything to the arbiter again this is gonna be forearm this is the left side uh i don't have anything under type so i'm going to hit oh then armature and this is tedious but the reason why i do it on a layer level here is so i can for one i can avoid uh adding a lattice for each layer of this grease pencil object and then adding five lattice modifiers or whatever um and it's better than just using a lattice modifier on the entire object and having it try to bend there are and i'll make a video on how to do that because there are some characters i want to utilize the bendy bones for and have more of a a creative arm bend but uh overall this is it's just cleaner and uh i could do a more in-depth video on why it's cleaner because you can add the detail on the fill and everything all at a separate level and everything just in my opinion looks a little bit better but that being said we're going to go ahead and parent all of these objects and or all of these layers i'm sorry and once you do that you'll see oh whoops i gotta i know it's quirky that you have to do the object and then go back and then hit armature uh if there's anybody that's working on the blender coding team or working on fixing bugs anything like that if you're watching this which i know you're not but if you are by whatever miracle there's this bug and it's i don't know it's sort of annoying so everything should be parented so that's arm arm it's all on the left side forearm forearm and then anything with the sleeves before so now when i go back to my bone i can hit grab and now it's rotating it doesn't look strange it's rotating along the point of the bone uh everything it's just got like a clean slate and yeah that looks good so we're gonna repeat the process for each of these we're gonna do repeat the process for our arms and for our legs as well so i'm going to go ahead and first thing like i said ctrl a apply all transformations come in here go ahead and hit o you can i mean it might even be easier just to go through and hit o so you don't have to worry about that but it won't do that the first time you go to parented it it's because this was parented to a different rig before and actually if i renamed this to eddie rigg it might even work out for me but we're not going to worry about that right now so this is going to be the right side now so right forearm armature [Music] connect it as a bone so it's going to be right forearm and you know rigging it's not it's not fun if you're gonna do a lot of frame by frame anyway honestly spending all your time rigging is probably not the best way to go if you can get by with rigging your characters in object mode it's a lot easier to just set the points of origin and then to just go from there but i like having inverse kinematics i feel like it's something that helps give me inspiration i guess on coming up with character poses and figuring out how to create those poses just makes things a little bit easier and it's a lot quicker in the pose library and all that um i i just find it useful and you know if you can get by without it and like i said if you're going to be doing a lot of frame by frame anyway it may not be the way to go for you because i mean god a full character it takes me like an hour at least okay so we've got the arm set up let's go ahead and get to the leg control a i've got less detail and you know if you get it down to try to get it down to just lengthen fill i don't know why you know sometimes when you do the detail you need to add fill in over top of different lines and all that but if you can just get it all down to lines and fill because it's it it'll make life easy that should be parented i like to check it after each one to make sure there's nothing nothing funky happening and that looks about right rotate yeah i guess so might need to reposition the bones i'm not sure if they're in the exact spot but that's all right we've got to move on to our last leg and this is why that's why if you can i mean you might want to just avoid adding bones at a later level because it's not very intuitive it's buggy you know and but i like being able to the reason why i like to do is i'm not making another video like i said about this but uh you can add background lines that you're over secting i'm sorry you can add background lines that are your intersecting overlapping puppet lines you can add your fill on top of that and then you can add detail lines to get this if you you can i mean i can zoom in here you can see you get yours detail lines that overlap and kind of show more definition and that's why i like to do it this way and it's a little comprehensive like i said but uh if you know you're gonna be reusing characters it could be beneficial to be able to save things uh in the action editor in the pose library things like that okay so we've got let me make sure everything's paired [Music] okay so everything's set up make sure everything's rotating properly because you know a lot of area or i remember it has a lot of room for error i should say with blender okay so there's that we can rotate our shin so now let's parent our hands and feet and our hair and our head to the rig so i'm gonna uh uncheck this locked object modes and that's gonna allow me to go back and forth between object mode and pose mode and i can use that by clicking on my hand and then holding shift and then clicking on my bone my hand bone and that brings me back into the pose mode and you can see i still have my hand it's outlined in red so by clicking control p and i can parent it just click bone and now we actually have a parent setup hand is parented to the hand boat so i'm going to go ahead and repeat this process for this bone and the feet as well my hair and my head both to my head bone and now we're getting close to being set up let's go ahead and pair our lattices so we need to go let's start with the body we'll take the body we'll go over to the grease pencil object we're going to add a lattice modifier which i already have on here it's red which means it's messed up it doesn't have the lattice connected so you're going to go to add modifier you can click lattice then under object you're going to click on our body lattice and uh they're named obviously the same as what you named your lattices that's why it's good to stay organized but body lattice and connect to the object and it's going to use the vertex groups which i don't know if we created those yet which we did not so for my neck i'm just going to select these top two and create a vertex group called neck assign that okay another vertex group i'm gonna collect these two and i'm gonna call this one chest whoops sign i'm gonna choose the next two i'm gonna call these abs these are all the same with what i named the corresponding bone and then just right here i'm going to select and call pelvis assign and i'm going to leave the last two unassigned because i don't want this to necessarily move everything around i just want to be able to kind of squash and stretch it so if i go back into object mode i select my bones i'm gonna go ahead and turn off the the lock object mode properties because it can get a little messy if you leave that on and don't realize it but now when i move my oh i'm sorry let me go to the body lattice itself back into object mode we need to add our armature modifier and that will connect it to the rig now there's no way to add it as a bone level which is fine it's going to go off the vertex groups that we created and that way it's able to be manipulated by multiple bones so now when we go into the pose mode on our armature we actually get some squash and stretch to the body which is very handy when we go to rotate our our neck here you can see we're getting some squash and stretch along with the shoulders and that's just going to look a lot more organic it's going to be it's going to be useful it's going to be useful for animating and that's what we want so i'm going to go ahead and clear everything out and we're going to do the same thing for our face object so i'm going to go ahead over to my head and you can see it takes a lattice modifier for each layer on your grease pencil object and used to not be able to stack lattice modifiers but i think as of earlier this year you can officially add more than one and before it would say like you can't have more than one of these types of modifiers well now you can on this object now we need to uh set up our vertex groups on each of these lattices and now these i'm actually going to select all of the vertexes or vertices i guess i'm going to select all of the vertices and i'm going to call this face control the same as the bone that i want to use to manipulate these objects so back in object mode select this other one go into edit mode hit a to select all of the vertices i'm going to call this face control i think i have all capitals for control you know and then assign we're going to do the same thing for the nose oh i'm sorry right there oh the mouth too i guess the nose a face control assign and then lastly the mouth edit mode a select all vertices new vertex group face control assign so now when we go into our pose mode on our armature i should be able to manipulate these with this face control bone um i almost forgot we do need to add the armature modifier onto each of these as well so for the eye armature modifier there's only one so armature temperature modifier to each of these okay so now when we go into pose mode we should be able to manipulate these and we can perfect so we've got our head control here we've got our face control here um let's go ahead and link our time offset modifiers and that's going to be one of the last things we really need to do so if we go over to our body i've already got a time offset on here and i'm going to delete this driver so we can start fresh and i'll show you what i did here so i'm going to right click here i'm going to click in add driver under expression i'm going to type in location so it uses the location to drive this time offset i'm going to type in location under here for input variable as well for the armature or the object i'm sorry for the object i'm going to add an armature and then uh for the bone i'm going to add my body offset which this bone right here is what it is and that's the bone i created to be this driver and then uh i'm going to switch it over to local space which we always want for our drivers and then under expression i'm gonna go ahead and hit plus four which uh well it's supposed to offset it to my fourth frame i must have applied something or has some weird transformation going on with the armature because it's starting off on three so i'm gonna switch it to 4.5 i guess and see if that yeah so that starts me off where i need it to be so when i go back into my pose mode on my armature and i grab my body offset as you can see we are now manipulating the body with this bone and i can actually go ahead and copy that over for my uh head as well and my hair so now i can move my face and my head they both rotate together as you can see i can place my limbs where they need to go uh the only other thing really we need to talk about i guess oh my mouth shapes too we just did the mouth shapes that's going to be useful for rhubarb if we want to have him speak later on down the line the only one more thing i guess to go over is the inverse kinematics which if you go over to bone constraint you can add inverse kinematics and it's as easy as bumping up the chain to two and uh i can go ahead and repeat that for the forearms and the shins as well and this is the main benefit of going through the trouble to creating a bone rig uh so that is that's everything so when we go to rotate our feet they wrote we have to hit r to rotate but we can also reposition them by hitting grab and moving them so that's going to be more useful for the hands when we go through different hand shapes we've got our inverse kinematics set up here for our arm we have our turn manipulation here we can do just the face if we want our character to nod a little bit back and forth our mouth shapes are here they're all set up to a driver and ready to be rigged this character is ready to go we've got our body with the squash and stretch i like that if you see this happening that's nothing more than really just a driver issue if i come over to the body and i hit edit nothing really happened and nothing's really wrong it's just one of those one of those quirky things in blender just click on your body go into edit mode come back into pose and now you can see it's working like it's supposed to be i can also add if i want to inverse kinematics to my head and what that'll do is when i grab my head object it'll give me that squash and stretch and it really makes the animation just more dynamic when you're able to do these sorts of things and you really you really get diverse uh animations now you can see the rotation points off on this i didn't actually go through and make sure my bones were aligned right i can just go back into edit mode and realign that uh this is for demonstration purposes right so that's why it's it's a little off this one's actually better over here but yeah very dynamic on what we're able to do my character he's laying in now he's all squashed and stretched we're able to yeah we're able he's ready he's ready for the rig so yeah that's the basis to uh to a 2d character rig i know it's uh it's pretty extensive especially if you want things like the inverse kinematics and all that but uh it's quite powerful and you know i guess that's really all i got so if you like this video please like and subscribe i do have other other blender projects that i could put on film for you guys if you liked that i've got quite a few different characters and different approaches that i take to rigging those characters in another video we'll talk more about the irig and how i use empties to manipulate that which you can also just find online anywhere already uh yes so i got more character rigging to do uh there's room scenes that i'd really like to get into talking about how they were created i don't really have much more time to film today but uh you know 3d assets being used in room scene this will probably be my next video is this room right here uh sort of like a lounge speakeasy type of room with a stage uh almost sort of a flapjack style i guess right sort of creepy uh yeah so if you liked that i've got more that i could bring and yeah let me know down in the comments so thanks for watching

Channel: Devin Cobb

Views: 1,796

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: nQBoyMHZmvU

Length: 31min 19sec (1879 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021