Auto-Rig Pro: T-Rex Rigging [Blender Tutorial]

in this video we are going to rig this t-rex with other rig Pro rigging dinosaurs has been a popular request for this series and while dinosaurs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes I think rigging something like this T-Rex will also allow you to rig dinosaurs with a similar structure such as an Allosaurus or Velociraptors and so on and I'm also working on another chapter in which we are going to rig a Triceratops most likely so that will show you how to rig the heavy four-legged dinosaurs and that should cover 80 to 90 percent of the dinosaurs that people want to rig I got this T-Rex model from sketchfab so you can get it from here or you can download my tweaked version from my files now let's get going let's go to arp and for this rig I'm going to start from an empty Armature technically you can start from the dog for example or even a human but it is pointless if you want to rig something like this you should be fairly comfortable with autoraid Pro and you can watch my previous video about creating custom rigs to get up to speed now I'm going to choose the empty Armature and that will give me just the roots they are a little bit small so I can press edit shape and scale up this route a little bit apply shape and then the other one edit shape scale it up apply shape and that's it that is purely visual but it will allow us to select these roots easier next I'm going to go to edit reference bones and right away I want to add a spine that is almost always the first so-called limp that you want to add so let's rotate it a little bit from the side view and scale it up and align it with the body of the T-Rex and because the body is heavy and not very flexible I'm just going to keep the number of bones to three if you want more you can just click on one of the bones and go to limp options and increase discount and you should definitely change the rig definition from biped to multi-pet let me show you why I'm going to press match to rig and now you'll see these spine controls which are aligned with the world that is great for humanoid characters but with animals you want to switch to multipat and then press match to rig again and the spine controls will be aligned with the spine bones okay back to reference bones let's add a tail and roughly align it with the beginning and end of the tail when creating your own rigs you should always parent the parts but the tail is automatically parented to the existing spine so you don't need to do anything now we want to decide how many tail bonds you want you can turn on wireframe and determine the number of Bones based on the edges so let's say that I want one bone per two edges so one one two three four five six seven eight nine ten okay so select the tailbone limp options and set count to 10. and then align the tailbones with the tail okay looking good next I want to add neck and head so ad-limp and choose a head there are facial Bones on the head and we are going to do the facial rigging later in the video but for now just to keep things simple and clean I'm going to go to limp options for the head and disable facial and I don't find skulls that useful so I'm going to disable them as well it's important to look at references to determine where the point of rotation would be so based on the reference that I just saw I I think the skull should be placed around here you can also Orient the head bone like this to cover most of the head it won't make a huge difference this is the Nick let's pull it out and if you want to have more neck bones you can select the neck limp options and set the count to as many bones you want two is fine for me so the neck unlike the tail is not parented so I have to select the first neck bone then shift select the last spine bone control P keep offset let's match the rig really quickly orienting the head bone like we just did gave us this control you can always edit it but if you change the orientation of the skull bone or head bone like this and match the rig this will be your default head control so it's up to you and again it won't make a big difference the most important thing is to place the point of rotation correctly let's add a left arm Interline it with the cute tiny arm of the T-Rex I'm going to leave the fingers for a little bit later so for now let's go to limp options and disable all fingers and press ok pair in the clavicle to the spine bone then select one bone of the arm and duplicate mirror and now we have a second arm now I can add a leg I'm going to disable all toes and press ok let's scale the leg way up and align it with the T-Rex leg this is a nice basic alignment for the leg I'm going to talk about the leg a lot more in the later Advanced part of the tutorial but if you want a simple default alignment this is what you want so the first bone is Thigh second is shin the next is foot the foot is raised in the TRX and the last one is toes in these small bones you show the line like this behind the toes and make sure that the end of the toe bone is aligned with the tip of the toes of the model something like this now I can parent to the spine duplicate mirror and that is our basic skeleton I can now press much to rig go to object mode select my TRX shift select the Armature go to skin I don't like preserve volume it's a personal preference and I'll press bind and you have a working T-Rex depending on your needs you may call this done you have body control head control net controls leg controls arm controls if this is all you want then thank you for watching but if you also want to rig the face the fingers tools and possibly make some edits to the leg rig then please keep watching the fingers will be easy to add let's go to rig edit reference bones select the arm limp options and add two fingers avoid the thumb because it's a little bit special so I'm going to go for index and ring you can see that the fingers are rotated a little bit so let's undo or go to limb options and disable the fingers and then press Ctrl R and roll this bone a little bit and then try again okay now the fingers appear correctly let's enable X mirror here and press Ctrl R again to mirror this change on the other side and here I'm going to enable the same fingers and then start aligning I like to align the fingers using volume snapping so enable volume snapping and then without enabling the magnet here press G to move and then hold Ctrl and the bone will snap in the volume of the model okay looks good match the rig foreign these settings are okay just press ok and now you should have finger controls let's work on the face now it's probably the hardest part in this tutorial but it's not too difficult let's go back to rig edit reference bones if I select a head and enable facial and press OK the face will kind of appear in this direction so let's disable facial Orient the head like this and enable facial again now if I press OK the orientation of the face bones will be easier to understand I'll go back to limb options and let's see what kind of facial features we want for the T-Rex eyebrows I can use eyes I can use I'm not sure about the nose but I'm going to leave it on cheeks I don't need for the mouth I would definitely want to increase the lip amount but I'm going to do it in a second for now I'll actually set it to one and you'll see why in a second Thief controls are not necessary they are for cartoony effects but I'm going to leave them on tongue is necessary and chins I don't need and press ok now let's grab everything and scale it up this large bone here is the jaw so I'm going to align it something like this so that it covers the jaw and then hide it or I can switch viewport display to stick this bundle of bones are the eye bones so I'll align them roughly with the eye these here are the Brows so we're lining with the brow and from the top view I'm going to rotate them make sure that you use bounding box center these three bones here are the nose bones let's move them roughly in the nose area this chain of Bones is the tongue let's make it a little bit bigger and place it around here and these three bones are the um are the teeth I'm going to place them around here in the upper teeth around here and the remaining bones are lip spoons so select them and let's move them somewhere um and let's move them over here so this roll control I'm just going to place around here and it's not going to be too important for us and the lower one over here this is the center control for the upper lips and this is the center control for the bottom lips in this here will be the edge of the lips so I'm going to place it around here and I can even use some face snapping and snap it here at the edge of the lip okay next go to the Head limp options and increase the amount of lip controls so I tested it and six is fine you can increase it even more if you want more lip controls actually let's set it to eight and I'm going to set the master controls to let's say three and press ok go back to limb options and make sure that you check update transforms here for the lips and press ok and that will arrange the lip bones correctly so things are getting hard to see so let's select all of the lips bones upper and lower make sure you got all of them and press shift h now I'm going to move the lower lips just so that things are easy to see if you don't do this you may get confused which one is top and which one is bottom and now you can use face snapping and snap these bones one by one slowly covering the edge of the lip lower lips now okay looking good let's unhide everything old age and focus on the eyes select this set of Bones shift h then go to your model go to edit mode and press L over the eye to select the whole eyeball then shift s cursor to select it that will place the cursor exactly in the center of the eye then go back to the rig edit mode and with all of these bones selected shift s selection to cursor then I can set the origin to 3D cursor and rotate these bones and scale them roughly pay attention to the names of the bones and find the corner one bone and align it with one corner of the eye and then the other corner and align it with the other side then find top zero one ref 0 2 ref and zero three and align them with the upper lid and then do the same for the lower lid Now find the bot ref bone and align it just below the center of the lower eyelid and top ref in the center of the upper eyelid then I Offset you can enable wireframe and use face snapping to snap it just in the center of the eye on the surface I mean okay this will be a good start alt H to unhide everything and now let's align these brow bones with the brow and this big bone is just a control so it's not that important just place it over the brow let's align these nose bones even though I'm not quite sure what to do with them something like this and now I can try to match the rig okay now the first thing that I'm going to try is to close the eye and just observe how the controls rotate and even though they don't deform the mesh I can see that they don't work correctly so go back to edit reference bones this is controlled by this top ref and bottom rev bones switch to octahedral and select these two bones and press shift h enable access and for this bone press Ctrl r and rotate it so that the z-axis is pointing up like this and this one is looking okay actually let's match the rig and find this control and try to rotate it and this is looking much much better and that wasn't too bad I think we are in good shape with the face now we want to update the skinning so here's what you could do go to the mesh edit mode and press L over the main mesh and go back to object mode then shift select the rig go to skin and choose selected vertices only and press bind something is wrong with this um arm here um let's go back to edit reference bones when the reference bones are hidden and you press match the rig you will get such problems so now with all bones shown press match the rig and everything should be fine again and you'll see that the jaw is now skinned I can open it with this control I can close the eyes they are controlling too much of the skull here but that's okay we'll fix it and we have these lip controls with some master controls and I think you can see how powerful the ordering Pro phase 3 can be now let's take care of the teeth I'll go back to the model edit mode deselect everything and then select all lower teeth I just point to the teeth and press ill because this is symmetrical I can go to select select mirror choose extend here and that's all of the lower teeth now I can go to the rig go to the last phone layer and let's find the key phones I think they're over here the lower teeth bones so now select the mesh shift select the rig go to skin and choose selected bones only and selected vertices only and press bind let's try voxelized it didn't work quite well hmm okay I can't get the teeth to bind completely to the to the teeth bones I'm not sure why so here's what I'm going to do select all of these teeth bones I hear some vertex that you can select and then go to item and here I'm going to set the value for thief bottom X to 1 and everything else to zero and then press copy and now the teeth are fully controlled by the by the teeth bone let's select all of the upper teeth bones and then I can go here and choose remove from all groups and then look for teeth choose teeth top X and click assign and now the Steve control will control the teeth if you need that let's take care of the tongue as well I'll select all vertices of the tongue again remove all vertex groups then go to the rig pose mode and find all of the tongue bones and select them now select the mesh shift select the rig go to ARP skin and use the settings selected bones only selected vertices only and bind let's go to edit reference bones I think the tongue bones are not aligned with the tongue mesh okay now we have the jaw working tongue is working lips are working we can control the browse so the main thing that I want to do is to remove some of the influence that this eyelid has over the skull here so select the rig and shift click this last bone layer here then shift select the mesh go to Weight paint mode and Ctrl click on one of these eyelid controls go to Tool use the subtract brush and enable auto normalize and because my mesh is symmetrical I'm going to enable X mirror here and then start clicking to remove this influence and then do the same for the other bones these eyeballs only need to have an influence over the eyelid and the central bone needs to have a stronger influence over the eyelid so I'll switch to mix and reduce the strength a little bit and I just need to keep painting until the closing of the eyelet looks good I can still see some influence here on this skull subtract it okay and I think the only thing that is not properly weighted yet is the eyeball so go to the mesh edit mode press L to select the whole eyeball remove from all groups then look for I and find c i dot L and click assign and then on the right eyeball I'll do the same remove all groups find c i dot r and assign now if I move this control here it will move the eye we also have this control for both eyes but it's rather useless for animals which Have Eyes pointing in opposite directions it looks like the eye bone is affecting the skull still so select the rig shift select the mesh weight paint mode and select the i group and subtract these weights here and now things are starting to behave quite well you can keep fine tuning the weight painting if you have to I don't have toe bones yet so let's add them and then I'm going to show you an alternative leg setup if you're interested let's edit your reference bones and add middle ring and index toes same on the other side and then align them with the actual model okay now I can match the rig and I want to update the weights just for the feed so I'm going to select these bones here and go to the mesh enable X-ray and select these vertices and then go to skin and again use selected bones only and selected vertices only and bind okay the fingers or the toes should be skinned now okay so again at this point you can call this done I just want to call your attention to the behavior of the leg if you move the ik for the most part it moves naturally but if you rotate the ik you'll see how it rotates around this pivot point which makes sense because technically this is the foot of the dinosaur so technically that's correct but when you start animating this way you have to move the ik then if you want this part of the rig to move you have to use this control here then maybe you have to switch to this control and make some adjustments and that's a bit too much for just animating the foot it would be nice if the ik rotated this part of the leg technically the toes is if they were the foot and I'm going to show you how you can set it up edit reference bones select the left leg limp options and enable three bone leg okay and enable it for the right leg as well and now I want to take this new bone and I want to make it the thigh bone the second thigh will be the shin this here will be the foot and the actual foot bone the food ref.l I'm going to make really really small in this area something like this and the toe will stay as it is okay parenting is fine so let's press match the rig now we have to reset the weights and I don't want to change the weights for the face so let's enable the deformation bones go to pose mode and select all of the body bones then on the mesh enable X-ray and select the whole body and then again I can skin with selected bones only and selected vertices only okay let's go to pose mode now the ik moves and rotates the toes as if they were a foot that is more or less what I wanted now the problem is that this part of the leg does not react to the ik but if I just go to two and increase the three bone ik slider I think 0.7 or so is a good value then it will start reacting to the ik you can increase it or decrease it depending on your preferences now if I just move this ik and rotate it that gives me almost perfect control over this whole leg with just one control one drawback is that we lost control over this point of rotation there is simply no control which rotates around this pivot point but that is okay with me um it doesn't bother me I don't feel like I need it feel free to disagree with me and to use the other setup but this is what I like now is some final touches I don't like how big these controls are so I would go here and use the edit shape button and just rescale them a little bit okay I'll try not to overdo this the edit shape function of autorick pro is really nice to work with and I really enjoy tweaking my controls so that they're exactly as I want them a little tweak that I would do is to switch the arms to FK mode so go to Tool and click snap ikfk for both arms because when they are in ik mode since they're so small they easily flip and behave weird so FK makes more sense here another very minor tweak notice how when I move this control to here the joy is open all the way to here so if I go to edit reference bones select the head limp options and tweak the jaw speed let's sit into two and press OK match the rig so actually that's worse I should set it to 0.5 and now it seems much more natural just play with it until it behaves well here I did the silly mistake if you go to the limp options for the head you'll see that I have update transforms for the ellipse which changed their positions so I'm going to disable it now press ok and I'm going to spend a minute or two realigning these lip bones again okay all done so be mindful of this setting it can be useful but it can also create problems when you don't need it

Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 16,711

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: bSVwdrJ34-o

Length: 31min 35sec (1895 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023