Armature rigging and Leg IK in Blender 2.81 for simple characters

hello everyone and welcome back to my channel my name is Stephan passion also known as infants yeah and if you've been here before you've heard that a million times well not a million times because I don't have that many videos but you've heard it a few times and if you knew welcome I'm glad that you decided to come and watch this channel in last video I created this low poly character here and today I'm gonna be doing an armature rigging and make sure that he can move so and that we can animate him my goal is to make a really quick and easy guide that you can come back to you can first of all go back and forth they're often acaba or go back and forth or forth to the different sections as you need and it'll show you how to create the armature bones how to symmetrize it and flip it how to create inverse kinematics for the legs and the foot movement and then also to do the automatic weights assignment and also correct any little issues that you might have with incorrect weight painting well I've been speaking long enough now let's just start the video first make sure you don't have anything selected and press shift a and add armature and then you go into the object data properties tab and expand viewport display and click in front so you can see the armature through your character and then I press shift space and G so I can get the little grab tool and then I move the bone up to the pelvis and then I resize it just by moving on the movement axis I select the tip and then I had to e to extrude and then right click to snap it back so I can keep moving it up along the z axis with the blue arrow I usually have a pelvis to spine bones a neck bone and a head bone and then I select the joint between the spine and the neck and then I hit e to extrude a collarbone and then I hit e to extrude the upper arm e again to extrude the lower arm and E again to extrude the hunt and then I shift and right click with the mouse to position the cursor by the hip and then I hit the shift a and add another armature bone and then I select the upper leg bone and then I hold shift and click the pelvis and then I press ctrl P to keep offset and parented to the pelvis select the knee-joint position it a little bit and then hit e to extrude right click to snap it back and then I move it down go to the side view using three on the numpad and then I had to eat to extrude the foot and then I move all the joints into the correct positions I usually just have one foot bow and then I put the tip at the toe by the ground and the heel just above the foot move the spinal a bit into place to follow the shape of the body as well as the neck and the head bone so it follows the shape of the character I usually use the G shortcut on the keyboard to do the movement press 1 on the keypad to go into front view and then I position the shoulder bone and the collarbone and I move it down load it so the neck is and the collarbone is in the correct place and I adjust the elbow and also the hand joints and the tip of the fingers press 7 on the keypad to go to top view and I make sure the adjustments is correct there as well pan around using the wheel button on the mouse and then I make sure everything seems to be correctly positioned inside the body and then I select the pelvis bone and I go to the bones tab and I start renaming them so the pelvis bone is the first one we're going to rename and then we select the lower spine which I usually call just spine and then to match the rag dolling unity I usually call the second spine bone chest and the neck is called neck and surprise surprise the head we're gonna name a head and then for the side bones we're gonna click on the shoulder bone and name it shoulder L for left as you can see it's his left and then I select the upper arm and rename that upper arm L and then I select the lower arm and rename that lower arm dot L and then finally the hand and named that hand L then I select the upper bone rename that to upper leg help and the lower leg dot L so L is for left and then the foot and I call it foot L it's important to keep that dot L convention because it'll be automatic to mirror the character later on here's a really important step as well and go to the front be using one on the keypad and then click a to select all the bones and do shift N and a line to view axis if you don't do this then you're gonna have problems later on with mirroring poses when you animate and now it's time to set up the inverse kinematics so I press three on the keypad to go into side view and then I select the knee joint and press e to extrude a bone and then the foot joint and I press e to extrude a bone the knee bone I renamed to Ike a leg pole dot L and then any to select the bone and press alt P and clear parent and then I use G to position it above the kneecap so that's gonna be the pole target for the knee and then while the bone is selected press alt P and Claire parent for this one as well and then while that bone is selected we rename it to Ike a leg target dot L and we also have to make sure that these IKEA bones don't deform the mesh so I select the bone and I go into the bone tab and I deselect deform now we're gonna set up there stood a okay so I select the lower bone press ctrl tab to go into pose mode and then we go to the bone constraints tab and add bone constraint and select inverse kinematics and then we need to change the chain length to two and then select the target armature and set the bone to Ike a leg target L and then for the pole target we also select the armature but here we select the I K leg pole the foot will be flipped so change the pole angle to 90 degrees to flip it forward again now we're in pretty good shape so if you select the target IKEA bone and hit G and then move it around a little bit the leg should be following pretty good now there is one problem though is the foot is actually pointing down towards the ground and we want it to stay flat to the ground when you move it so we need to fix that I need to do that we need to go to the add bone constraint and select copy rotation for the foot and then we select the target which is going to be the eye cave light target bone it's probably going to be rotated incorrectly so you need to change the space from worldspace in both cases to local space that alone won't really fix it so we then need to go into the bones tab and expand relations make sure it doesn't inherit any rotation and now the foot should stay in the same rotation as the target bone but now we've got a different problem and that's the rotation is incorrect so we go back into the bone constraints tab and then we invert the x-axis and now it'll rotate correctly with the target bone we can also go to the top view or the shift 7 to go to the bottom view so you actually see the foot and then make sure that the rotation is correct there as well which it is it's time to flip this character so I'll go out of object post mode control tab click a to select everything and then I press f3 and type symmetrize this will automatically flip all the bones that have the name dot L in them and then it'll make a duplicate in the exact mirrored x position and rename them automatically to dot R for the right side so that's really convenient that's why we use the dot L conventions earlier and go out of the object edit mode and select the character hold the shift key and select the armature and then press ctrl P for armature deform and use with automatic weights this will automatically map all the character vertices to the bones and it does a pretty good job so in control tab back into pose mode we can see it's done a fairly good job joint seems to be moving quite good the spine the arms all the vertices and of the character rotate pretty good the eyes are a bit messed up at this point but we can fix that in a minute then we can also go into side view using three on the keypad check that the bones alright or the foot and here we've got a problem with the back it's moving we don't really want it to do that so we need to fix this when you're done testing in pose mode hit alt G and alt R on your keyboard to reset it to the default character positions the T pose and now we're going to fix that back issue with them that was connected to the leg so I select the armature and I shift click and select the character and then I go into the object and I switch it to the weight paint at the top left and now we can hold shift and left-click on a bone to select it and we can see on the color of the character how the vertices are mapped so if they're blue they're not mapped at all and if they're green yellow or orange red they're mapped at different weights were greeness the least and red is the most I go to the top and I change the weight to zero because we want to remove the vertices in the back from the light and then I change the mode to mix and then I can start painting away and I can assure that the back of the character and the hips above the hips is blue again so it doesn't follow the leg motion anymore I switched to the side J using three on the keypad and I select the target bone and I make sure that the back isn't moving anymore the character turns out of the blue color because the target Aiki bone doesn't have any deform on it ok we're done with that we'll go out and wait paint into object mode again and make sure everything looks alright let's test the character and move the different joints again we can see that the foot is okay the back doesn't move anymore and now we're going to make sure that the arms are rotating okay as well which they seem to be and so does the spine and the chest bones all seems to be real taped good enough for a low poly character like this and then finally we're gonna fix the ice that were not following the head correctly so I'll press tab to go into edit mode and then I hit L over the eye and select all the linked parties is for the eye and then go into data properties let's scroll to the top of the vertex groups and then we select the different bones that we don't want to be mapped anymore so we hit remove on those bones for the neck and shoulders and everything like that and when we're pretty sure that all of those bones that could have been affecting the ice we reassigned them to the head so select the head in and click assign again now we should be good if we go back into post mode we can see that the eyes are now following the head 100% and that's pretty much it we've mapped this character good enough now for the low poly and you can always tweak here to whatever level you need but for my purpose this is pretty good so let's keep like this alright everyone I hope that wasn't too fast or anything like that for you again just pause rewind go back and forth and I hope it gave you enough information about the keystrokes that I use even though I didn't cover everyone in very detail so you can look at my channel history for it some other videos as well I've got some low poly modeling and some some tips and tricks about blender modeling so that contains a lot more of the key presses and in detail so make sure to have a look at those videos if you want any further information in future videos I'm gonna take this character and I'm gonna animate them let's create them an idle and a running animation for example so if you enjoyed this video out there you give it a thumbs up and don't forget to hit the like button it yeah the like button is that the same as thumbs up I think it is but subscribe if you want to watch another video as well and don't forget to hit that little bell as well if you definitely want to see when it comes because you never know I might drop in another video in a few days or maybe next week so take care everyone and I'll talk to you soon again and happy game development or blender modeling or whatever ease that you do and and Merry Christmas as well we've got Christmas around the corner I hope you've got all your presents if you've got kids good for you and if you don't good for you as well make sure everyone's happy for Christmas I'm gonna be really busy now wrapping all the presents for the kids and yeah visiting some family and friends and it's a nice time of year so let's it's not gonna be a white Christmas this year as long as we're happy everyone that should be good enough so take care and I'll talk to you soon again bye [Music]

Channel: Imphenzia

Views: 106,006

Keywords: blender 2.81, blender, low poly, armature, rigging, rig, bones, inverse kinematics, ik, weight paint, blender 2.8 ik, blender 2.8 armature, blender 2.8 inverse kinematics, blender 2.8 weight paint, imphenzia, tutorial

Id: pkuOs_VA_y4

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 21 2019