2D Head Turn | Blender Grease Pencil

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh hello everybody so i want to show uh how i did this rig but rather than doing doing a big giant long tutorial i'm going to break it into pieces that way it's easy to find the one thing that you're looking for so what i'm going to cover today is how i do these head turns and my goal was not to do these rigs that people do that are really cool it's just not the style i wanted to go for that it's like a continuous rotation i wanted to have the set positions of uh the drawings the way a 2d cartoon classically would so i'm gonna show how i do that setup uh from scratch in a new file not drawing the whole character or anything like that because it's really not important to the tutorial so i have a blank scene i've already deleted all the extra stuff i'm going to create a grease pencil object a blank i'm going to create a layer that i'll call head and then i'll create a layer that i'll call nose and the head drawing let me create a material too i will call outline as you're rigging a character like this naming all this stuff from the beginning becomes it makes your life so much easier as you're going to try and select these things again and especially as you get complex things like drivers which we are going to be getting into so i'll create that called outline i'm going to be on the head layer control tab to get to draw mode and i'm going to keep this simple just draw a circle using the ink pen this doesn't need to be great just needs to be clear so i'm going to lock that layer so i don't actually accidentally edit if again oh looks like i drew my keys at the at the wrong frame so let me move those now i'm going to lock that just for for my own ease i'm going to start with the the draw just the nose in the center [Music] it's going to draw a simple cartoon nose here i'm gonna make it bigger because it fits my style better except i'm drawing it really crappy all right so that is my first drawing and i'm drawing this the way you would uh if you're doing a turn in traditional animation so i'm gonna go to my next frame and i do have the record button on on my my timeline so it automatically creates new frame this is blender 2.93 by the way so my next drawing i'm going to put about right there let me turn on onion skin looks like i lost some volume there so i'll redraw that and i try not to be too reliant on onion skin there's a a channel i'll i'll link to uh who has great great tutorials on on 2d animation and he talks about relying on just being able to see volumes as you're switching back and forth so the volumes aren't right on that yet but um for now i'll just leave it so now i have my front my three quarter and now i'll do side looks like i lost a little bit of size there too so i have those and that works like a lot of a lot of times uh 2d cartoons are done front three-quarter inside but if we want a little bit more detail i can spread these out and then go and do the in between drawings [Music] that way i have a more detailed turn i can get a little bit more positions out of my character so let me turn off onion skin so we can see how that looks and the the shapes a little wonky i'll just go in to scope mode really quick pull the shape around try and get it to be more similar that's close enough for our purposes this is only half my turn obviously and i have to do the other half first and normally i try and encourage people to to draw the stuff new um it just teaches you to be a better drawer by not relying on duplicating things all the time but so this being my center drawing i want it to be the center of the keys that i make so before i duplicate that other side i'm going to put my put this as my center and then i'm going to uh basically reverse this footage which i guess i could have just done at the done it in reverse in the first place but here we are all right and i so now i have it going the other way shift d to duplicate shift d to duplicate shift d to duplicate so now i've duplicated it it plays over what i'm going to do is now go into edit mode [Music] uh i want this one to be on the other side i'm gonna turn onion skin back on because it makes it a little easier so i right click this mirror local x then g for to move it and hit x so i can constrain it to the x axis [Music] go to my next frame mirror local x g x mirror local x g x mirror local x g x i think one of those is not that great this one looks like it needs to go back this way a bit so now we have [Music] turn off onion skin again there we have our turn now what we need to do i actually need a blank frame here i'm actually going to create a blank frame here too because that when the nose goes behind it so now what we need to do is set up the controls for this so i'm going to go into object mode again i'm going to create an armature and i only need this one joint or i need two joints this will be the root which i like to keep at zero first thing i'm going to do is change bone layer and i like to put these kinds of hidden things on this layer it's completely arbitrary you can do whatever so now you can see that white dot there indicates there's a joint there i'm going to create a new joint and i will just move this over here it's arbitrary [Music] now this is going to be the joint that controls the the head rotation i'm gonna go into pose mode [Music] as always i'm gonna name this i'm gonna hit name it control head turn a couple of things that i need to do on this i need to add a custom property so add i'm going to change the name to drawing indexer because i want this is going to uh other things in the scene are going to reference this and it makes it easier if i do all the setup on this driver uh on the driver that this is going to represent um then i have it set once and then everything else just has to reference it i don't have to do individual setups on every driver so i'm going to make the default value on this zero and i'm not putting a decimal that way it keeps it as integers whole numbers um or the property value then i'm going to set the default value to zero then i'm going to make the range minus 10 to 10. and however many drawings you have you can make plus you can make extras if you have like special drawings you could always put in there but uh for this purpose 10 works uh it's actually more than i need so now i have that what i want to do is have the x location of this joint drive this drawing indexer so what i can do is right click here copy as new driver [Music] and then paste driver and you'll see that that as i drag this around that number is changing but i have some more to do to this first i don't want to be able to move this in any direction the only thing i need to move it in is side to side so what i'm going to do is go to the bone constraints add bone constraint limit location and i'm going to check all of these including the effect transform you'll notice it jumped back to zero what you need to do is where it says owner change that back to local space and now all those limits are starting from where it's currently sitting and all i need here is uh the x location to be able to move so i'm going to do minus 1 and then positive 1 on the maximum x value so now you see i can only move that no matter what i do i can only move this side to side if i go back here you'll notice my my drawing indexer is updating but it's only going from zero to one or to minus one what i need to do is go into my drivers my driver settings here and that you can find that panel in here um if you want more uh like detailed stuff on drivers check out level pixel level uh i learned a lot about driver stuff from that channel so i want to change this from average value to scripted expression and in this particular example i need to multiply that by 10. and it's whatever however blender is under the hood calculating this one meter just necessitates that uh someone could probably explain it to me it's not even worth trying to figure out why multiplying it by 10 here works in my actual rig i actually multiply it by 100 because of the scale of the character and how much that thing actually moves in the scene makes that make sense so now if i move this you'll notice the drawing indexer down here going from minus 10 to 10. so i'm i'm done with that uh the only thing i need to do now is get that to drive the drawings so first thing i need to do i'm going to copy this data path and what that's that's going to allow me to do in the in the the driver when i paste that in the path it will make the new driver look in that location all right going back into object mode selecting my grease pencil object so what i want to do is put in the modifier panel i'm gonna go to add modifier time offset so this allows you like if say you have 100 frames of animation but you want to have it happen three frames later three times later that's what this does in its default state but we're actually going to use fixed frame and if you you'll notice as i move this value you'll see my nose going across as it's rotating it we're going to use the bone actually that drawing indexer on the bone to control this but you'll notice right now if i go by the head disappears so i want to make sure that this only affects the nose and what we can do for that is here in the the object properties i select my nose open up this thing that says relationships where it says pass index i'm going to change that to 1. you can set this number to what whatever but it allows you to have different things affect just certain grease pencil layers i'll go back to my modifier where it says influence i'm going to change that to pass index and one so now you see my head's not disappearing [Music] but now i need to control this so i'm going to add driver then go to i don't need any of this i'm going to choose my object which is that armature i'm gonna change this to single property and now i can paste that path [Music] so right now if i go back to my bone here you'll notice that my default position is not the center but if you remember i shifted all those things all the drawings over to frame six i think it was uh so the center is not uh frame zero but the value there is zero so what i can do is go here [Music] and just take that variable and add plus six now it's in the center go back to my go back into pose mode and now you'll see i have the this control [Music] controlling the side to side motion of that thing and all it's doing is using that value to cycle through drawings so it's pretty straightforward and if i go back to my other rig to show this in detail so i have the hair the nose the ears are all doing that and each one of these if and go back to the thing you see i have an a separate offset for the body one for the nose one for the head and actually the one for the head and the one for the nose aren't that different i used to have a much more complex setup where i had separate control of the hair the nose and all that but my rig was getting extremely slow so i've been uh simplifying that and that's that's the basis of it you just have to go in and do each of your drawings if you're chasing this style and so the next tutorial i will show how i did this setup which has all the squash and stretch which by itself is actually really simple too and i'll do another short tutorial like this alright thanks bye everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music] to save your life [Music] your gratitude [Music] you

Channel: Chris Neuhahn_Art

Views: 772

Keywords: mcsteed, mcsteedtv, chris, neuhahn, vacant planet, factions, monkey, animation, film, blender, blender 3d, grease pencil, blender greasepencil

Id: BZOT5OvkNuw

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021