Auto-Rig Pro Tutorial: Rigging a Fox tutorial (with face)

this is the third video about rigging quadrupeds with auto rig Pro in this one we'll be working on this fox model and will focus on rigging the face of the animal rigging the body is basically the same as in the dog example which is a previous video in this series so please watch the dog video first I consider it the basis for working with other types of quadrupeds as I usually do I got this fox model from sketchfap you can also download it from the sketchfab link that I'm going to share with you but you can also get a cleaned up blend scene from my gumroad files either way it's free and there is also a very affordable paid product if you want to support my effort in creating these Auto Rick Pro tutorials with the paid one you'll get some bonuses such as Early Access to videos progress files resources and so on so what is special about this um Fox is that it has eyes Okay eyes a separate object um and then if I select the whole body and hide it it also has operative lower teeth and tongue so actually I'm going to separate these parts I'm going to select both eyes Ctrl L to complete the selection and P to separate okay then the tongue I'm going to select it with l and P separate selection okay and then I guess I can hide these two new models so basically those are the the eyes and tongue that I just separated so I'm going to hide them and hide the Box edit mode these are close I'm not going to separate them so from side view let's enable X-ray and try to select only the vertices of the upper jaw with the gums and teeth so select Parts like this and press Ctrl L and then move things around just to check and here's something that wasn't selected I'm not even sure what it is but let's select it here's some other pieces okay that should be it maybe I should go to mesh merge by distance and yeah some vertices were merged anyway p and separate the selection and then I can just select I can just box select the lower teeth control L just in case P separate selection okay I'll unhide everything so this will be my fox and I'll hide it for a second and then rename this to a fox eyes Fox upper teeth lower teeth and tongue and hide everything and let's start rigging with auto rig Pro we have some standard armatures and in this part I do want to use these pre-built metrics so the closest that we have to a fox is the dog so select the dog and edit reference bones select all bones and I'll switch Pivot Point to 3D cursor so that I can just scale down um and not lose the basic positioning of the rig at the ground okay I'll also move it backwards a little bit in edit mode you can actually scale um one specific axis so for example I can just stretch the rig on the y-axis if I wanted to so in this case we are going to want the face rig so I'm going to leave it like this and then start the lining so let's quickly select the tail and switch to bounding box center and the line okay spine Nick and head always keep in mind the point of rotation of the head so now let's align the legs foreign ing the Bones from bottom to top but as before let's try to find a reference image of the skeleton of a fox just to make sure that we're doing it correctly so here is an image and you can see that it's basically the same thing we have the toes foot Shin thigh scapula in this model the position of the foot is not very clear I can actually go to the model I can actually go to model old H2 and hide the vertices and I guess the the foot is around here so I'm going to pull these vertices a little bit just to indicate where the foot is okay then back to the rig I'll align this bone to the foot and then the next one to to the shin the next one is the thigh and this is the scapula this looks okay these bones look almost perfectly aligned from the front view we may need to move these bones a little bit something like this and then let's do the back leg again paying attention to another and here again just like with the horse I can use the limp options to remove this final bone but in this case you know what I'm going to leave it like this and just place it in this position and then make sure that my other bones are aligned from All Views let's align these small bones here okay this alignment looks good so now we have to go ahead and align these um Facebooks actually let's take care of the ears first because they're kind of easy just rotate them a little bit around and position them into the volume of the ear cool um so now hide the head hide the neck or you can give the neck two bones if you want to okay hide these bones hide the ears as well just select them and press h and now I can select all of these bones and move them here in front so make sure that you're only moving them from the side view or maybe you if you're using the gizmos you can just move them on the global y-axis don't move them sideways okay so now if I isolate these bones and look at them they may start to make sense a little bit these are the eyes for example these are the the Brows this is just a brow control you can specify where to place it these are um cheek inflate bones you have to place them in the cheek area these are the tongues tongue bones um teeth bones and if you look from the side view these are lips bones here let's zoom on them and you can see that they're marked as bot for bottom or let's see um top for for the top clip okay so we need to know which one you're working on um and so I could align these bones manually so for example grab all of the left side of the eye make sure that you select all bones and move them in the eye area and start rotating them until they kind of align okay then same with the brow bones you can scale them if you want to that's not a problem in edit mode you can use face snapping to snap the bones on the surface of the model so this is the jaw for example the tongue I'm going to place it roughly and then later align it um cheekbones I'm going to place them at the cheeks teeth bones just move them roughly into place and then grab the lips and place them in the lip area and then you can then um start moving them individually you can use nothing again okay this is the okay this should be the lip corner and this is a smile control I can move it over here so you see that it is a little bit confusing but it does make sense so now these small bones we have to figure out what they do so this is the chin just place it at the chin this is another chin ball so I'm going to move them both at the same time and kind of place them at the chin okay this is another smile bone so I'm going to place it around here near the mouth lip spawns I'm going to place them around the lips nose so the both of these are nose bones I'm going to place them I guess like this I'm not quite sure to be honest but we'll see this is also nose bone so something like this I'm guessing and now if I press match to rig you'll see that I have face controls in the face area so I think the eyes are not quite well aligned so if I go to edit mode I can select these ends of the bones and use um and use face snapping so this is the corner of the eye so I'll place it in the in the corner and this is one of the top bones this is a bottom bone and this is a corner bone so place it like this okay I'll hide the fox model for a second and something else that we want to do is in edit mode place this connection of between all of the bones exactly in the middle of this um of the eye so we can use volume snapping and snap around here or you can select the whole eye just when I shift this cursor to select it and then go back to a rig and we've with all of these bones selected shift s shift s selection to cursor so this is how you can align these face bones completely manually but actually it is kind of possible to use these smart features here for the face of the fox so here I'm going to save my file and I'm going to try to to do this smart alignment so I'll select the the fox and make a duplicate of the whole model and then in edit mode I'll isolate go to X-ray and then um select just the head of the fox like this maybe that that will be enough and then I'll press Ctrl I and delete all vertices um let's see they have to be in x-ray mode so now I'm going to deselect these vertices here with circle select and middle Mouse button and now I'm going to delete this cool so now I'm left with this model here um the reason I did this is if I use the entire model I can do it but basically Auto Rick Pro when it automatically detects the face features it uses the whole model and basically for an animal the body is right behind the face and so Auto Rick Pro will kind of take into account the body and it and things won't be aligned correctly so I'm going to hide this entire model and just select this copy and click get selected objects in the smart menu and then facial only and press ok and now I'll have to place the chin around here and then do a facial setup okay so now if I select the I I can squash it a little bit and rotate it and move it into place something like this then I can then I can move the individual dots um here's the mouth so let's move it down you can squash it a little bit on the z-axis and then I'm going to move this dot here at the edge of the mouth and then just align the remaining bones and then just aligning the remaining dots is uh best as I can so this is the nose I guess it has to be something like this these are the cheeks around here and these are the ears so I'm going to place them inside the ears and these are the brows so if I enable wireframe it may be easier to see I can do something like this okay um then I can also select the eyes so I have one eye object and it is Fox underscore eyes and with that the facial setup look is looking good I'm going to press go and you'll see that all of these bones that I previously aligned manually are now aligned for me automatically so that is very nice when it does work but I wanted to show you the manual way as well because sometimes you may not be able to count on the automatic face recognition especially with animals that have eyes on the side of the face it I think it won't work so you'll have to align them manually but okay um it did work so I'm going to delete this face copy um actually it did work but there is something weird about the alignment of the head now so again this automatic face recognition is meant for humans and in animals it fails a little bit it could fail a little bit so I have to go to edit mode and unhide all bones and align the neck and head again that's quite easy maybe we can change the position of the jaw I guess if we look at our reference it should be around here so something like this and then I can go to ARP and match the rig then hide the reference select the rig a to select all meshes go to skin and for this fox I think heat Maps will work quite well heat Maps Works quite well with these connected meshes where you don't have overlapping meshes such as clothing props and so on I'm going to disable preserve volume it's just my personal preference and I'm going to disable these additional settings because as I told you I think they're meant for human rigging but on non-human models they can actually create problems so then under specials I want to set up the eyes or rather just check if they're set correctly and they are so I'll press bind and it's done if I test the leg again I'm going to create my preferred defaults so so three bone ik 2.1 and disable snap alternate same on the other leg gings here they're looking okay the tail works spine The Spine Works and let's check out the facial stuff so the mouth does work the teeth are stretching I'm going to fix this really quickly and if you watch the previous video then you already know how to fix it these are the eyes let's go to shaded View and disable the wireframe and you'll see that I can manipulate the eyes I can kind of close the eye that will again require weight painting I did the exact same thing in the previous video so in this video I'll probably skip doing this you can refer to the previous video so to fix the teeth I'm going to hide the main mesh and select the lower teeth go to edit mode so one way to fix this is to select one vertex and then a to select all other vertices and I want these teeth to be weighted to teeth bottom to teeth bottom.x so let's find another vertex maybe around here so okay let's select all vertices and here I'm going to type teeth in the search field and find teeth bottom X and assign and now for this active vertex that I have I'm going to delete all other vertex groups and just leave Chief bot X to 1 and press copy and that will make all other vertices be weighted fully to this ball I'll do the exact same thing for the upper teeth just select one vertex so it's active and then I'll try to find there you go Thief top dot X I'll set this to one and delete all the other vertex groups and then press copy to copy this to the other vertices now if I open the mouth the teeth are opening correctly um for the tongue I'm going to select the rig and go to the deforming bones hide this Jawbone and I actually have to align the tongue bones correctly so let's go back to ARP and rig and edit reference bones from the side view enable X-ray and let's take the [Applause] thief the tongue bones and align them to the tongue something like this match the rig and then I'll select these three tongue bones go to object mode select this select the tongue delete all groups go back to the rig pose mode skin use only selected bones and bind okay it didn't work okay and that is because I wasn't selecting the actual deforming balls I have to go to this layer select these bones and now I can bind okay and now my tongue is working as well cool okay I'll quickly change the shape of this head Auto Rick Pro can never get this one right okay looking good so this box is now functional I could say of course you can go to Weight paint mode and uh you know try to improve these weights um you can do the same as we did for the horse normalize make sure that you have mirroring and then um maybe the weights are too strong but make sure that but make sure that the body is controlled mainly by the spine bones and not by the leg bones with the default weighting the legs tend to affect too much of the skin so just um paint more weights for the actual spindles and that will remove the weights from the legs okay if you just spend enough time weight painting this fox should start deforming well now before we end this video while aligning the bones of the rear leg you may have seen a little annotation telling you to do something different than what I'm actually doing in the video but in case that was difficult to follow let's adjust things together I'm going to go to the auto Rick Pro and let's move this reference out of the way then go to the rig go to the ARP Tab and click on edit reference bones okay so now instead of using this bone is a pelvis I want to actually use it as the thigh bone so I'm going to move this bone down in this one more towards the leg like this okay so this first bone will be the thigh bone the second bone will be the lower leg the next bone will cover the foot and the last two bones will basically cover the pole okay and you can always take a look at the anatomy reference to see where the bone should be placed and then I can press much to rig and now if I try to move this leg because we completely change the position of the bones things will look bad so here's how to fix it the problem is the weighting of the bones and we also don't want to affect too much of any custom weight painting that we have done so here is what we could do I'm going to click on this dot here to show the deformation bones and select all of the leg bones in this spine or pelvis bone so make sure that you have both sides selected then go to a object mode select the fox go to edit mode and select all vertices in this area so again I'm using X-ray and I'm selecting both sides okay then I can go to object mode shift select the Armature go to skin and use selected bones only and selected vertices only and click bind so that will redo um all waiting in this area only and only for the selected bones so now I can enable my controls go to pause mode and now if I move this leg it's going to be moving with the new bone alignment here I see a couple of vertices there that were unweighted completely I can go to object mode display the deform bones shift select the mesh go to Weight paint mode and I'm going to control click this this phone here and I think it's moving these weights will do the trick um maybe weight painting a little bit so enable X mirror and auto normalize and paint and also I'm going to paint for this one for this site as well let's move a little bit and with a little bit of painting it's looking better I can disable pole parent okay now I have the rear leg setup that I recommend and that I like there will be more videos coming to this series so make sure to like And subscribe with notifications and you can also get early access to these videos as well as exclusive content by buying this course on gumroad thanks and talk to you soon

Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 18,290

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: qc7yT-hyhOI

Length: 29min 23sec (1763 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2022