Auto-Rig Pro: Custom rigs from Scratch

in this part of the autorig pro course you'll learn how to build custom rigs from scratch the basic workflow is to go to the ARP tab and from the add Armature menu choose empty then from the add limp menu you can start adding the so-called limbs limbs here doesn't just mean arms and legs but any of the self-contained rig presets that auto Rick Pro provides for you so the spine and the tail and the ears are all limbs in Auto Repair Pro terminology here you can see how I can quickly build something that looks like a human rig with a couple of clicks then I can click on Match the rig and see the final animation rig here the limbs are not connected because I didn't parent them to each other but I can always go back to edit reference bones and tweak the parenting or reposition the bones to change the proportions of the rig also in this mode I can select any of the limbs and click on limb options and here I can change these parameters which will change how this limb looks and behaves especially if you've watched the previous videos in the series this shouldn't be too alien to you we've added custom Limbs and tweaked the options already I recommend watching at least the human and dog videos first in this video we'll go over the limbs and some of the related operators and settings I'm not going to go over every single limp options that would take way too long but you should get a good feel for how things work then as a little exercise will rig this simple humanoid model with ears and tail which is a true CG dive classic and I'm also working on another video showing how to rig this combination of all mythical creatures it looks a little bit ridiculous but it will allow me to show all of these limbs in action so let's start a new file go to ARP and create our empty Armature in the first limb that you will almost always add is a spine so let's add a spine and that automatically puts us in edit reference bones mode something interesting about the spine is that you can only have one in this rig so if I try to add another spine other Pro will tell me that I can only have one spine for now but you can rig even very complex characters with a single spine for example I've already tested it with The Centaurus and it works great the spine will allow me to explain this rig definition option here we have biped and multi-pad and the default is pipette if I match the rig now you'll see how from the front view and the side view these controls are perfectly straight now my bones are currently also perfectly straight so let's change their orientation a little bit and match the rig again and you'll see that the generated controls are still completely straight and flush which is probably what you want in a humanoid character that stands straight so when you have rig definition set to biped that will create these straight controls even if the spine has a slight curvature again that is great for humanoid characters but if you have something like a horse for example or a dog or most animals that have a horizontal spine and match the rig you'll see that the controls become very hard to understand in those cases just switch to multi-ped and you can click the match direct button and that will reorient the controls to respect the orientation of the actual reference bones I'm going to straighten the bones and switch to biped again if I select one of these pine bones and go to limb options that will show options specific to the spine a very important setting here is the count number this will Define the number of spine balls currently it is set to 3 and that is why we have three spine bones here if I set it to four and press OK that will create four spine bones and that brings me to a very important point when working with auto Rick Pro especially in the edit reference bones mode and that is that even though you're in bone edit mode you should never manually add or delete bones so for example technically I can select the end of the spine and press e and extrude a new bone I can select the bone and delete it I can do this but I shouldn't because now if I try too much to rig um it actually worked but you can see that it didn't respect the bone that I deleted so I'm going to undo also if you want to get rid of this entire spine do not select everything and delete it instead select any one of the bones and click disable in my opinion this button should be called simply delete because it will get rid of the entire limp disable kind of sounds like you will be able to re-enable it but that's not the case it simply deletes the whole thing so disable and it's gone so let's add another spine also if you want to duplicate a limp never select it and press shift d that will not work that is why we have these duplicate and duplicate mirror buttons they are grayed out because currently I'm working with the spine and as we saw earlier we can only have one spine in a rig but these duplicate options will be enabled for other limbs you'll see that in a second there are settings in this menu which I won't cover in detail in this video so just a couple of words about each of them in its scale will apply the scale of your rig when you press match to rig um so if I scale this rig you'll see that the object scale of the rig becomes 1.185 now if I match the rig and go back to item object mode you'll see that the scale is again one but personally I would just recommend that you never scale the rig in object mode Legacy can make autorick Pro work like in previous versions of the add-on personally I never use this so I cannot tell you much about it secondary controllers can add nice additional controllers for squash and stretch and you can choose the type of control from this menu some of the options like bendy bones are more powerful but not exportable and other options are exportable to game engines and so on but they may have more limitations for now I'll just keep this option to none export will allow you to export your custom rig and then at any point you can import it again so it will be similar to these pre-built rigs that you get by default with autorig Pro importing and exporting have some caveats so I may make a separate video about them but I won't cover them here okay let's start adding some limbs now I'm going to switch the definition to pipette edit reference bones and I may want an arm so let's add a left arm and we'll get an arm on the left side of the character if I want another arm on the right side I have a couple of options I can choose the right arm or if I undo I can simply select one of the bones of the left arm and choose duplicate mirror and that will give me the exact same arm on the other side so if I undo if I have tweaked this arm a little bit and choose duplicate mirror that will give me the exact same arm structure on the right side if I have a creature with more than two arms I can click duplicate and move this new arm down a little bit and then we have to parent things so these two arms will be parented to the top spine bone and this new arm probably to the second spine ball now if I match the rig I'll have a spine and some arms and they are connected together foreign as far as the options for the arm probably the most important ones are the fingers you can have up to five fingers like in a human or you can disable some of the fingers if you don't need them you can have finger ik as well which can be cool but not essential wings I covered in the recent bird ring video so you can watch that to get the details about all of these additional options the other options I may cover in other videos let's add a leg again you have similar options you can add up to five tools or disable some of them and a very important options for the leg is the three bone leg which is essential for rigging animal legs especially the hind legs also very useful for anthro characters so let's press OK here duplicate mirror to have a right leg as well I'm going to give more separations to my spine and make it into some sort of a animal and human hybrid it's a good idea to check the parenting of this arm now now if I duplicate this leg and move it to the back and give it three bones that will give me this additional bone and again this is essential for rigging the hind legs of animals parent duplicate mirror let's see if these guys are parented no they are not now if I match the rig things will be looking good but some of these spine controls are not well aligned because I have rig definition to pipe it let's just switch to multi-pad and match the rig and that will give me better alignment of the spine controls and now if I move this pelvis control everything should be moving together might be easier to see if I enable the deformation bones they show the structure of the rig maybe these legs should be parented here to this spine bone that will make them react to this spine movement now back to reference bones I can add a head the head automatically has facial bones enabled all of these small bones are facial bones now if I select the head of the character and go to limb options the head actually doesn't have that many options it has these skulls which mostly help with the weight painting not super important what is super important are the facial options so if I just disable the big facial button and press OK that will remove all of the facial bones if I enable it they'll be back on and I covered some of these facial options in the human fox and a little bit in the bird so you can watch that and I'm planning to make a separate video all about the facial features of autorig pro for now we won't go into detail if I have x-axis mirror disabled and select all of this including the neck and move it to the side I can actually add another head so I can have a creature with more than one head and the headlamp also includes the neck it's interesting that the neck has its own options so if you select just in neck bone and go to limp options that will give you the neck options this can be a little bit unintuitive so you have to know which Bones have options and here the main thing that I can change is the number of Nick bones so if I set it to a higher number I'll be able to make the neck longer let me disable facial for a second to make things easier and just pull out this head bone and then stretch out the neck bones so now I have four neck bones and the last bone is always the head so that will have the facial features let's parent the next also to the spine and now I can match the rig and now things are getting a little bit busy here but you see that the heads are parented to the spine for the long neck Auto rig Pro automatically generated this special control which bends the neck so that will make it easier for you to animate longer necks such as bird necks and so on we have the heads and each head has facial features back to edit reference bones we have ears they are a special limb which you will most likely attach to the head so you can parent them to the Head bone in fact they're already automatically parented to this first head they have settings for the number of ear bones so you can have pointy ears like this or droopy ears like this it really doesn't matter you can do that with the ear limb so if I generate you'll see that the ears are really not that special they are just a simple FK chain of holes so if you have something in your character that is not a near but it needs to be a simple chain of Bones you can use the ear preset we also have a tail which is kind of self-explanatory anything that resembles a tail you can rig with this preset if I try to parent it it already comes parented to the first spine bone which is great in most cases but if this tail needs to be parented to something else for example if it's a ponytail on the head then I'll have to re-parent It to the Head great and let's add another tail which will be a real tail now okay it's parented so I can match to rig gonna have this tail in this I guess ponytail on the head speaking about the parenting between individual limbs it is always safe to parent the end of Two Chains so I can parent the end of the tail to the spine and the end of the leg to the spine and so on and generally all spine bones seem to be safe to parent things too but sometimes for example if I try to parent this tail to one of the lower leg bones and then much to rig in this case it worked but I have seen errors when parenting to some of these bones so keep that in mind so here you can see that degeneration worked but the parenting is not really working the tail is not moving based on the movement of the leg so I'll have to parent it again to the spine Bowl we also have a breast preset and that will add these two pairs of Bones so pay attention to their name and the one that is called breast01 will be the main breast bone and the other one is an additional breast control when it comes to the breast bones do not get too excited about their functionality they are fairly simple it's just a bone which if you generate we'll give you this half sphere shape but do not expect any Dynamics or anything special like that I made The Centaurus model female on purpose and we are going to use the breast rig there so you can see how by just playing around and adding parts and parenting them together I got something fairly complex the coolest thing is how it all works together and the final two Loops that we have are a spline ik chain and a bendy bones chain these are Advanced chain rigs they can be used to rig things like hair ropes cables snakes tentacles and so on I still need to test these Rigs and to come up with nice use case examples for them and I'll try to have such examples in The Centaurus video now let's do some quick examples a guy with three arms tail and some ears another problem go to ARP add an empty Armature biped add a spine add an arm tweak some options if you have to symmetrize the arm duplicate it you can align it with the third arm let's parent things add a head no facial stuff parent add ears this one is longer so give it a count of three legs no toes align symmetries parent match the rig skin bind oh we forgot the tail back to rig edit reference bones add Dale align match the rig skin bind and now it's really done now let's try something more interesting spider go to ARP empty Armature multi-pad add a spine and a leg no toes and three bone leg align it using volume snapping duplicate and align duplicate and align duplicate and align parent the legs to the closest spine bone symmetrize symmetrize symmetrize symmetrize and a tail and for these tentacles we can use this plane ik or bendy bones chain but also the ears will work use x-axis mirror give the ears three subdivisions align them in parent match the rig skin click bind for the legs you may want to enable three bones ik and that will make the legs behave a little bit more like spider legs and that's it done total drinking time 5 minutes I hope you like these little examples take them with a grain of salt I cannot promise you that this spider here is ready for production and animation but getting to something that pretty much Works in five minutes gives you so much time to tweak things if you have to

Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 30,837

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: KVTo7dDJxOM

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023