Auto-Rig Pro Tutorial: Rigging Humans

hey welcome to the first actual tutorial in this series about using autorig pro if you don't yet have autoric pro you may want to check out the first two videos they are meant to help you decide if autored pro is right for you if you should buy it if you're here then i assume that you already have the add-on or maybe you want to get a feel for how it works in this video we'll be rigging humans this is one of the most common rigging tasks and autovic pro has amazing tools and automations but i want to emphasize that auto rig pro can do much more than that you could rig animals with it like dogs horses even birds and you can even rig fantasy creatures that don't really exist in the real world i think most tutorials stop at the human rig but in this series i want to try to cover all sorts of scenarios that auto rig pro can handle so if you want to see this make sure to subscribe with notifications and so on also feel free to let me know what kind of content you would like to see in the comments and i may include it in the course okay so next you need auto rig pro if you haven't bought it already you can go to the add-ons page on the blender market and purchase it i'm going to give you a link it's going to be an affiliate link which means that i'll make a little profit if you buy through it once you've bought the add-on you'll be able to view your order and in here you'll be able to download autoric pro and below it you'll see a readme on how to install the arrows so download these files and you can go ahead and read the text file or you can keep watching the video i'm going to show you how to install the addon so usually when you download an add-on as a zip file you can just go to edit preferences add-ons click install and go ahead and install the zip file that you downloaded in the case of autoric pro it is a little bit different here i'm going to open up the zip file here's the contents and you'll see that it contains a pi file and two more zip files in a 2.79 folder you have to unzip these files somewhere on your hard drive so personally i have a special folder where i place the newest version of autodec pro so here i'm going to delete the previous version that i had and just select all of these files and place them in this folder if you're using the ancient blender 2.79 then go into this folder and you can use these special files for the older blend version i've never done that and i'm not going to cover this personally i'll be using the newest version of blender blended 3.2 and the newest version of autoric pro so the actual autoric pro add-on is this one autoric pro master dot zip the proxy picker is an additional tool that i'll cover in a separate video and rig tools.zip is a mini add-on that you can send to someone else when you're sharing your autorig pro rig with them to make full use of the rig they need this mini add-on and it's very important that you do not install both atoms so in this case we are only going to install auto rig pro master okay i'll go back to blender edit preferences add-ons click on install and i'll go to my folder where i keep auto right pro and highlight auto-repro master and install it and then i'll put a check mark next to the add-ons name there are some add-ons options that i'm going to cover in another video in this video i just want to keep it simple and focus on some of the most useful and commonly used features so in this video i'm going to show you two examples of rigging a humanoid character one will be very simple and the other one will be more complex it is only because auto rig pro has really cool features that i can use such a complex character in a beginner's tutorial and if you want to follow along with me with the exact models that i'm using i'm going to share these models for free on gumroad and most likely you'll be able to pay a little extra and get some bonuses but you'll be able to get the main files for free i'll share a link to the gumroad page in the video notes okay so i'll open my first file and it should be called something like arp rigging symbol and when you open it you should see this file here you may recognize this guy from my rigify series and up here you'll see a little info about the license basically this is my file i'm releasing it as creative commons so you can use it for whatever you like just try to credit cg dive and thank you if you do and then i'm going to close this and focus on my character so i just installed auto rig pro so if i open the end panel here i'll have the arp arp top and here is the main auto rig pro interface at the top you'll have the auto rig pro rigging features below it is the smart features which we'll actually be using in a second the smart features allow you to rig a humanoid character really simply remap is actually retargeting and i already covered retargeting if you want to know how to use this feature in auto rig pro i already have a really in-depth video about that and i'll share a link and finally we have export which basically helps you export auto rig pro rigs to game engines or other applications but mainly game engines and their special presets for unity and unreal all right that was the overview now we are going to focus on the smart features so i'm going to select my little character here click the only button that i see here on the smart get selected objects you have the choice between full body and facial only we're going to be doing the body now so full body and press ok when we press ok auto rig pro automatically puts us in front view and it gives us these buttons so the main button that we are interested in is this add button so first we want to add the neck when i press the button this circle will appear and i can place it somewhere at the base of the neck there isn't a very precise guide as to where to place these points but you don't have to be super precise and you can also fine tune the placement of the actual bones later you'll see that in a minute so next i want to place a chin so i want to place it around here and i can also zoom in once i've clicked to confirm i can always press g again and keep moving the marker next i'm going to zoom out and add the shoulders so when placing the shoulders don't really place them on the top of the shoulder place it a little bit inside the volume of the shoulder something like this and if your character is symmetrical like mine you can keep the mirror option on and you can simply work on one marker and the other one will be set up automatically if your character is not symmetrical then you can turn off mirror and move each one individually but in my case i want to use the mirror option to save some time so next we want to add the wrist like this next spine root so again this is not entirely clear but place it somewhere in the crotch area maybe a little bit higher something like this where the base of the spine would be and next we want to add the angles so somewhere here and here is another important tip you only need to place these markers from the front view technically you can go to the side view in this case they are already kind of in a good position but you can possibly try to move them around but you don't need to you just need to place them from the front view and then autoregrow knows what to do one exception may be the ankle i just find it a little bit easier to find the right spot from the side view so something like this these are all of the markers that we need next autoric pro will try to automatically place all of the bones including fingers and it will try to detect the fingers automatically we just need to let it know how many fingers there are you can have up to five like in a realistic human but in this case my character is simplified and it has a basically a glove hand so basically i have two fingers this big lump and then the thumb so i'm going to set my number of fingers to two below it are the settings for the automatic finger detection i usually just use the default settings and it tends to work well and if it doesn't then we can tweak the fingers manually i'm going to show you this as well most of the settings we're going to leave to default so this skeleton setting is mainly if you're going to be using unreal for now we're going to leave it to default spine count will define how many spine bones there will be my character is kind of simple so three is fine these next options are kind of advanced we can talk about them in another video neck count will define how many neck bones there will be this character again is kind of simple one is fine twist count is the number of twist bones so in the legs and arms each part of the limb so for example the upper arm and the lower arm can have twist bones and they should have twist bones because that helps with the deformation of the character so the default is twist count of one which means that one additional bone will be placed here at the shoulder and one at the wrist and that will help improve the deformations uh and it is similar with the leg so i'm going to keep this to default then we have facial setup and my character doesn't have any face features so i'm going to skip this and i can go ahead and press go which will create some bones for me so it is important to understand that this is not the final rig these are the so-called reference bones or if you have rigified experience you can call it meta rig so in most cases arp will do a good job at placing the bones at the right places usually the elbow may need a little bit of tweaking for the elbow it is important just like in riggify that the arm is not too straight you want to give a little bit of an angle to these two bones auto rig pro will do this automatically but if you're tweaking this position then keep that in mind and here we can see the placement of the fingers it is not bad but we can tweak it a little bit if i look from the front view this joint here seems a little bit misplaced i'm just going to move it deeper inside the the hand so something like this and then this joint can be a little bit deeper into the thumb okay this looks good the knee can be a little bit lower and these bones these little bones at the foot will determine uh the behavior of the foot and we kind of need to place them at the edges of the foot something like this when working with the reference bones you can go to the autoric pro tab and in here you have a bunch of useful features which i'm going to cover in an advanced video for now i just want to show you how easy it is to achieve good results with just the default settings but basically if you select any of these bones you have limp options for each of the parts of the rig you can duplicate them and delete them and so on to create advanced tricks but for now i just want to go ahead and click much to rig so this is the magic button that will create an advanced rig for you so let's click it and you'll see these pretty shapes that autoric pro created for us and that's it the rig is actually working we can go to pause mode now and give it a try so you'll see that something is happening but the character itself is not moving to make sure that our rig moves the character there is a process called binding or skinning or waiting so i'll go to object mode and click on the skin tab on the autorig pro i'm going to select the mesh and then shift select the character and auto rig pro has a bunch of advanced binding options and i'm actually going to cover some of them in the next example in the advanced character but for this simple character you can just press the bind button and a second later you can go to your rig go to pose mode by the way i'm using a pi menu you can just go in here and choose pose mode and now if you move the hand for example the whole arm will be moving in ik mode i'm going to try to give you an overview of the rig controls for now let's not go too deep into this but you can see that the character is moving with the rig and you can see how easy it was we just placed a couple of markers pressed a couple of buttons and now we have this we have a moving character it's pretty cool so i hope this shows you that rigging especially when using an auto rigger doesn't need to be scary and when you're ready let's move on to the advanced example i'm going to open my complex human example here it is and again here you can read the license in this case i downloaded this model from sketchfab the license was creative commons attribution which means that i have to give credit to the original creator thank you for this great model and i did some edits myself basically when you import sketchfab models into blender they can't have some problems and they just cleaned up the model and the materials so again feel free to use this model for any purpose as long as you credit the creators so let's take a quick look at this model it actually consists of several separate meshes so the main one is this body mesh which i can hide and then there is a hair mesh both eyes are a separate object there are eyelashes upper teeth lower teeth and a tongue so let's undo and alt h to unhide everything so if you have a similar model but but everything is joined into a single object i can do something like this just select everything ctrl j and join and then i could go to edit mode and press l to select the different parts that i want to separate into a separate object i can also box select like this and then press ctrl l and that will complete the selection and now let's see another technique is to enable x-ray okay and now everything that i wanted is selected i'm going to press p and split it into a new model and i can keep doing this just selecting the meshes and separating them so i'm going to just undo and get my separate meshes and when rigging this kind of complex character with auto rig pro you may want to hide meshes that will get in the way especially when doing the facial setup this character has facial features so we are going to rig the face as well so i want to hide the hair and also the eyelashes i'll explain why in a second okay so with that i can just box select over the whole character this will also select the teeth um that is not that important because they are inside so they won't get in the way so then i can go to arp smart and i have to make one of the objects active so just shift and click on it go to smart and get selected objects choose full body and press ok so now the process is the same as uh in the previous part head neck head chin at shoulders kind of inside the shoulder volume add wrists add spine root add ankles again i'm going to look from the side view just for the angles and place them around here now this is a realistic character and it has five fingers so number of fingers five and the detection settings i'll just leave to default spine count and the other settings i'll leave to default and then i want to do the facial setup just press on the button and go to front view and auto rig pro gives us these lines that we want to align to our character so first there is the chin and just like with the body markers there is no precise guide as to where to place them but a lot of them actually make sense so for example this is the chin line so i want to place the lower dot at the bottom of the chin and in the upper one at the end of the chin something like this then the mouth i may want to show the textures here and then i can press l to select the whole mouth marker and i can move it with g i can also scale it and then i'm going to scale it down a little bit and then scale and press z to scale it on the z-axis and then place these corners at the corners of the mouth so you can place these dots on the outline of the mouth but there is an official video from the creator of photoric pro and he places these markers a little bit inside the volume of the mouth the nose this is the tip of the nose and this is basically the top of the nose when aligning the eyes i may actually want to go to object mode here object mode and select the eyelashes when you go into the face setup alternate pro unhides all of the meshes for some reason so i'm going to hide this again select the markers again go to edit mode and then again go to front view with l i'm going to select this whole marker for the eye press s and z to squash it move it over the eye i can rotate it and scale it and that will give me almost perfect um alignment in this case but i can then grab each of the individual dots and place them where they should be so this is the inner corner of the eye and this is the outer corner and the rest of the dots are just aligned at the outline of the eye then we have the brows and here the texture tells me exactly where to place the markers if i was in a solid mode i wouldn't be quite sure where to place them another technique is to enable wireframe and that may enable you to see where the placement should go um but yeah but in this case the texture will show us the exact placement and now we come to this line here which to me is the most mysterious and unclear of all but again if you look at the image from the official video it is placed something like this along the cheeks of the character and finally we have the ears so just align this dot with the bottom of the ear and this one with the top of the ear and make sure that all dots are overlapping with the mesh if you have a dot like this you will get an area when you press go i'm going to show you in a second and here we have the eyeball setup so here again i'm going to go to object mode select my eye mesh and you'll see that both eyes are joined into a single object so in this case i want to select one eye object one and it will be my eyes object if if i go to edit mode and i select one of the eyes and separate it into a separate mesh then i have to select two eyes and select the right eyeball in this field here but i'm going to undo okay my eyes are again joined into a single object now i'm going to select one eyeball and my eyes object if this field is empty and you press go you'll get an error so make sure that you enter the eyes in here and also here is the other area that you can get if i just move this marker outside of the mesh and press go i'll get another error so i'll undo everything is overlapping eyes are set up and then i can press go and here just like in the previous example autoric pro created the bones for us in this case it also created reference bones for the eyes mouth so for the whole face so usually the first thing that you should check is the fingers and in this case auto rig pro did an almost perfect job at detecting the fingers if some of the fingers are misaligned like this in my opinion the best way to align them is to switch to volume stopping keep snapping off and then move the joint and hold ctrl and it will snap into the volume of the finger something important about the fingers is that there is a little bit of a curvature to them if the curvature is opposite like this then the rotation of the finger will also be wrong so give them the correct curvature other than that it looks good maybe the shoulder can be a little bit deeper into the mesh in the elbow um this mesh doesn't really have a well-defined elbow but somewhere around here is fine i guess it can be a little bit hard to tell if the reference bones for the face are perfect but usually auto rig pro does a good job and here is why we hit the eyelashes in the hair you'll see that the hair is overlapping with the brows so if we had the hair selected these brow bones would be on top of the hair which is not what we want and same with the eyes if the eyelashes were there then the eye bones would be generated on top of the eyelashes rather than on the actual eyelids so we helped autorec pro align everything correctly and that way we won't have to do any manual work or at least not too much so check your rig again you may need to align these little bones again at the edges of the foot and this one in the middle so from here i can go to the auto rig pro tab and again in here i can select any of the rig parts and check the limb options again this is something that we'll talk about in another video for now let's just use the default settings and see if we can get good results so click the magic button match the rig and get the pretty shapes nice next again we want to skim the character and to do so i'm going to go to object mode select all meshes and then shift select the rig so make sure that the rig is the active object then go to skin if if a mesh is the active object then we won't be able to click bind so i'll make the rig active so next we want to bind or skin or weight the character to the bones of the rig we already did this in the simple example but the more complex the character gets the more difficult it is to weight it nicely binding is as important in rigging as the creation of this amateur and that's why it's really nice that auto rig pro gives us tools to make the binding process a little bit easier so let's look at the settings first we have the engine and by default it is set to heat maps so if you have a little bit of experience with trigging in blender you may know blender's automatic weights if i have a mesh and a rig selected and press ctrl p i can choose with automatic weights and that will automatically assign weights to the character when it works it is really great the problem is that sometimes it fails so here autoric pro is using the exact same feature that we have in blender automatic weights but it can do some additional operations to help avoid errors for example by default it splits the meshes so very often the area that happens with automatic weights is because there are overlapping meshes if you just split them into separate objects and weight each one individually the results may actually be better there is an option to optimize a high-res mesh so if your mesh is very dense with polygons you can use this option in our case it won't be needed there are some advanced settings that i won't touch for now we may address them in another video then there is specials and here again you can set your eyeball object and that will automatically weight your eyes eyes can be a little bit annoying to wait uh so this will automate the process and then we have even more settings to fine tune the binding you can only use the selected bones you know you can go to pose mode and in here at the last layer is actually where the deforming bones are and if you just select some of these bones then you can use selected bones only and that will limit the effect of the binding only to the selected bones i'm not going to do that right now also you can go to edit mode for the mesh and just select some vertices and if you use selected vertices only again that will limit the effect of the binding only to the selected vertices i think i think we'll have an opportunity to use this later in this video preserve volume will change something in the amateur modifier i'm not a big fan of this option but i'll leave it on and i'll show you what it does later in the video um scale fix if the binding fails you can try checking this option and binding again this may fix the problem again it's a little trick that auto rig pro does under the hood and so for now i'm going to keep this default options with the default heat maps engine make the armature active and try to bind so after a couple of seconds the process is finished and if i go to pause mode i can try to move some of the rig parts and let's see what happens so here you can see that the arm is moving but here there is a little part that is disconnecting this is a common problem with heat maps but overall it is not too bad it is working and let's check the leg as well so it's also working but here i can see that the foot is stretching for some reason the shoe actually this is not a very common problem but for some reason we are getting it here the body looks okay the head can also move well it seems to be affecting part of the jacket which i don't want but we can fix this later this is the jaw widget if i press g to move it it will open the mouth and it actually works quite quite well but you can see that the teeth that are inside are being deformed so this is a very common problem with autoric pro i'm going to show you how to fix it a bit later in the video this is the eyes widget if i disable overlays and move it around you'll see that the eyes are moving and we even have a little bit of eyelid deformation going on so not too bad so i can select all bones and press alt r o g alt s and that will just um reset the pause of the character so let's try to switch the binding engine and bind again and see if we get better results so i'm going to switch to the voxelized engine and again select all meshes and have the rig as active so the voxelized engine is a native feature of autoric pro and it has type 1 and type 2. i usually just use type 1. there is a voxel resolution if you increase it you may get better results but the process may take longer so again with the default settings let's just press bind and see what happens so again after 20 to 30 seconds the process is finished and i can go to pause mode and try to move the arm and here you'll notice right away that this little piece that was disconnecting before is no longer disconnecting and overall this engine will give you better results with overlapping geometry so again let's try to move the leg and see what happens and the shoe is actually fine now if i rotate the leg around there is just a little bit of clipping between the skin and cloth here we can fix it manually or you can try to play around with the voxelized settings the head will also move fine you'll see that the jacket is no longer affected but there is a little bit of a problem with the skin here down here again this is not too much of a problem but now we come to the disadvantages of voxelite skinning if i try to open the mouth you'll see that it doesn't open at all basically voxel skinning is great at overlapping geometry but when there is polygons that are just close to each other then they'll get fused together like this and also the eyes actually they they're kind of okay but overall heat maps gave us better results for the face and voxelized gave us better results for the body and there is one more uh option voxel heat diffuse skinning add-on so if you click on it you may see this message saying that the add-on is not installed i actually have this add-on and i made a video about it so if i go to edit preferences add-ons and look for voxel heat if you're skinning and just enable the add-on as soon as it is enabled the warning message will disappear and auto-rig pro will let me use this add-on but instead of going to the official tab of the add-on i can use it from here so just for fun let's try to bind with this add-on and it's finished now if we try to pull the character you may find slight differences the overlapping of the sleeves is a little bit better and in the foot if i rotate it around you'll see that skin and cloth are not clipping at all and here if i rotate the head you'll see that the problem with the skin that we had is gone there is a little bit of problem with the cloth now uh so there is no perfect solution but you see that this add-on has some advantages so if you're okay with spending some additional money you can also buy this add-on it's really great i use it a lot and again i have a dedicated video about the add-on itself but the native voxelized engine works great as well so you can use that so i'm going to bind with voxelized again actually let's try type 2 just so we don't rely on any paid add-ons okay so it's done let's see the results really quickly actually the actually the clipping here is fixed that is nice oh and the clipping in this area is fixed as well so it's definitely worth playing around with these binding settings but of course with a voxelized engine you'll always get this problem in the face so if i just select the face go to edit mode and press alt a to deselect everything and press l while hovering over the face that will select all face vertices then i can go to object mode and shift select the armature let's go to pause mode and really quickly select everything alt r alt g alt s and next in object mode i'm going to switch back to heat maps and choose selected vertices only and then bind so now my face is weighted with heat maps so the mouth will open well but for everything else the voxelized weighting will be kept so i'm really loving this workflow and if this wasn't a tutorial i would just go through these settings really quickly and it would take less than a minute okay now the character is rigged and weighted so it can move with the rig but there are a couple of problem areas so i'm going to move the rig around and try to notice any problems and then we'll try to fix them actually this clipping problem is there i'm not sure why it seemed to be gone before but for the most part the problems will be in the face you'll see that the teeth are stretching really badly so i'll definitely fix this this here is supposed to close the eye but the weights are really not good so i'll work on it a little bit and maybe we'll try to address this problem here so it's mostly weight painting problems and by the way let me quickly address this preserve volume option so we always had this setting checked while binding the mesh what this does is yeah i'll just raise the oops i'll just erase the leg a little bit now go to object mode select the mesh go to the modifier tab and here is the armature modifier which connects the mesh to the bones and in here you'll see this preserve volume option by default blender doesn't use it but i guess the developer of autoric pro likes it so this autoric pro setting here automatically enables this setting in the amateur modifier i don't like this setting because it tends to bulge out some areas of the rig and also it doesn't transfer to game engines so it may make your character's deformation better in blender but this will be lost if you export out of blender if you only plan to animate inside blender then you can have it on or off whatever looks better to you i'm going to turn it off but if you plan to export the character then definitely turn it off okay now let's start fixing the problem areas i'll hide the main body mesh and focus on the teeth so again i have upper teeth lower teeth and a tongue object i'll select the upper teeth and before we fix the weights we want to make sure that the bones that correspond to the teeth and tongue are positioned correctly so i'll go back to the rig tab select the rig and click edit reference bones and that will give me again the reference bones or the meta rig whatever you want to call it and you'll find the teeth bones above and below the tongue bones so these three bones are the tongue bones this is the central thief bone and this is the right teeth bone and this is the left upper thief bone why do we have left and right actually you don't need to use all of them that will just allow you to bend the teeth which may be useful in cartoony characters so i'm going to select the jawbone because it is very large and it makes it hard to see what i'm doing so selected press h and then i'll select all of these three upper thief bones go to the side view and place them inside the volume of the upper teeth and then from the front view i'll place the bones on the sides of the teeth of the upper teeth same thing for the lower teeth just select these three bones they're called teeth bottom ref from the side view place them around here from the front view move them a little bit to the side and that will be it and now in object mode i'm going to select both um i'm going to hide both thief objects and then back to the rig go to edit mode and move the tongue button and move the tongue bones into position something like this so you can edit these reference bones even after you generate the rig once and even after binding the character to the rig this is not so much thanks to autoric pro but thanks to blender blender is very flexible in this regard so even at this point if i find that the shoulder is not rotating correctly i can just grab this joint and move it around reposition it and basically change the point of rotation of the shoulder that can be very powerful it's very cool that blender can do that so when i'm done editing the reference bones just in case i'm going to press alt h to unhide any hidden bones this is good practice and much to rig again now you'll see that these teeth widgets in the tank widgets are placed exactly where they should be so next i'll go to object mode alt h to unhide everything and then i'll hide the main mesh so that i can see the teeth again and so i'll select this upper teeth mesh go to the data properties and here on the vertex groups i'll just click here and choose delete all groups so any waiting that we had on this character will be gone let's do the same for the lower teeth and for the thumb so now if i go to the rig pause mode and move this jaw widget you'll see that it no longer moves the teeth in the tongue when manually tweaking the weights in auto rig pro it is important to know that the deformation bones are here on the last layer you'll see that some of them still look like shapes not like bones you can kind of change this if you go to viewport display and disable shapes but it doesn't matter everything that is here on the last layer is deformation ball and on layer one and two are the controls so when you want to work on weights go to the last layer and all other layers are so-called mechanism bones they create the automations in the rig and it's best to leave them alone so now to weight the teeth i'm going to use again some of the advanced skinning options so i'm going to select the three teeth bones right center left and right and then go to skinning and disable selected vertices only and enable selected bones only so now because i have these three bones selected auto rig pro will only use them for waiting i'll go to object mode select the upper teeth shift select the rig i'll choose voxelized and again make sure that i have this setting enabled and click bind now if i go to pause mode and and move the bones nothing seems to happen so i guess it failed let's try to use heat maps then same settings and click bind now it's only now it's only assigned to this bone oh okay i didn't have all bones selected i just had to select all bones and then with heat maps click bind and now you see that each bone kind of deforms the upper teeth and don't worry if we enable the the controls here's this main control that moves the whole upper key and most of the time you won't even move these controls you'll just open the jaw and then everything will move automatically let's keep binding and you'll see how it works so select the lower teeth shift select the armature enable only the last layer go to pause mode select the three active bones and with these same settings click bind okay now if i enable the main controls and open the jaw the teeth will move with the jaw and here i can kind of deform the teeth or move the whole thing and now we only need to take care of the tongue which we'll do in the same way just undo okay i'll hide the teeth select the tongue shift select the rig pause mode enable the deform bones hold shift while selecting all of these three tongue bones and with the same settings click bind okay now in object mode i can unhide everything select the rig and enable the control bones or control shapes go to pose mode and if i grab the jaw and move it you'll see that it opens the mouth the teeth and tongue are also moving properly with the jaw if you want to move the tongue you can do it like this you can rotate these controls you can also move them and stretch them if that helps you achieve the deformation that you want and that's it the mouth and jaw should be fixed now now let's focus on the eye so it seems like the upper lid is deforming the lower lid which is not good and also it has too much influence over the polygons above the eye so here we are going to be doing good old-fashioned weight painting and i have a full playlist about weight painting if you want to learn the basics here i'm going to go a little bit fast but i'm going to tell you the most important stuff so go to object mode and i'm going to hide the lashes again the eyelashes select the rig and again unhide the deformation bones and then shift select the mesh and go to weight paint mode right and you may want to click on the x-ray button here so that you don't see the bones through the mesh and now if i control click and now if i control click on this bone i should see what it affects but it looks like i selected the i have the hair selected rather than the face so let's select the rig should select the face and then go to weight paint mode and if i control click here i'll see what parts of the mesh are affected by this shape and it may not be super obvious but you'll see that there is a little influence on the lower lid so let's go to tool where you'll find the options for weight painting and here on the symmetry i want to enable mirror vertex groups and also the x option so that way anything that i do on this side of the mesh will be mirrored on the other side and i don't have to manually paint both sides next under option i'm going to enable auto normalize i always enable this option and that saves me some trouble please refer to the weight painting playlist if you want an in-depth explanation but for now i'll set weight to zero which means that i'll be removing weights here the strength i can keep to one and with f i'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger and paint on the lower lid and make sure that all of the light blue color disappears you can also enable show zero weights and that will allow you to easily see weights that are greater than zero so for some reason the mix mode didn't quite remove the weights fully so i'll switch to subtract mode trapped and set the weight to one so i'm fully subtracting the weight and then click until the whole lower lid becomes black and then also control click on the next shape and do the same i want to remove all influence of this bone below the upper lid okay this also affects a little bit too much of this of the cheek so paint it out similarly here let's see the angle and i'll keep erasing the weights okay let's see the bones on the lower lid so again i don't want them to affect the upper lip at all and also i'm going to erase the weights that go too far down okay something like this and then again i'll go through the bones on the upper lid and i'm going to reduce the strength of the subtraction and i want to remove the influence of this bone over the brow basically okay same with this bone reduce the strength and try to raise the weights so that it only affects this part of the upper lid okay so i think this may be starting to work now so let's go to object mode select the rig unhide the controls go to pause mode and try to close the eye and you'll see that it's much better it doesn't affect the lower lid but it looks like the central bone is affecting the sides too much so let's close the eye shift select the mesh and go to weight paint mode again ctrl click on this central bone and i'm still in subtract mode so i'll try to subtract some of these weights from these sides and also subtract the weights that the edge of the eye has on these eyelids okay and now i'll switch back to mix in with these uh same settings way too one and strength to something low i'm going to try to click in this area to make to make these vertices more affected by this bone so it's almost there i just don't really like the outer edge of the eye so again select the rig shift select the mesh weight paint mode and i guess this pawn shouldn't be affecting the upper lid that much so let's go back to subtract mode and subtract these weights also it goes too far into the temples so now i can control click on this control and try to close the eye again let's try to paint some weight for this central bone over here on the side of the lid so mix mode low strength and i'll paint just a little bit okay so the solution was actually to paint some weights for the edge of the eye on the side of the eyelid i'll go back to object mode and now my eye is closing reasonably well you can keep painting the weights this process can be very time consuming but you can get even better results another tool that you can use is the blur tool and i'm going to call this one done for now so another problem area that you may encounter are the eyelashes i'm going to press alt h to unhide them here they are and now if i close you'll see that they don't really follow the eyelids so here is a very powerful technique that you can use not only for eyelashes but it will help in this case i'm going to delete all groups for these eyelashes i want to set the weights anew and i'll go to the modifiers and add a data transfer modifier i'll move it above the armature modifier and then as a source i'm going to use the picker and choose the body or the face mesh then i'm going to enable vertex data and in the options vertex groups and then press the generate data layers button so now if i go back to the data properties you'll see that we have the vertex groups again but now if i go to my rig and go to pause mode and move the eyelid a little bit you'll see that now the eyelash is trying to move with the eyelid but not quite um so that is because this modifier is live so as i'm moving the control this modifier is being updated to avoid that i want to apply the modifier so click this triangle and choose apply now if i go to the rig and move the eyelid you'll see that the behavior is different it's still not perfect that is because the transfer didn't quite propagate to the end of the eyelid i'm going to enable wireframe so the eyelash mesh is kind of big here is its end actually over here and so now we're going to have to do a little bit of additional weight painting so select the rig shift select the eyelash and actually i'll go to edit mode and press l and then l one more time on the other side to select the upper eyelashes press p and separate them into a separate object so this is again the power of blender it allows us to separate and join objects and the weights just stay together by separating these meshes i don't have to worry that i'll be painting on the lower eyelash and i can just focus on the upper one so select the rig shift select the eyelash weight paint mode and now i'm going to control click on this here which is the control of the upper eyelid and i can try to blur i guess a little bit but yeah i'll have to paint so blend mix weight to one and strength to something low and i'm going to paint at the top of the eyelash okay then select this control here and paint some weights and this control and paint some weights over here and then maybe the edge and paint some weights and now blur a little bit but not too much so i guess i have to paint a little bit more here at the top okay and now we're getting something that uh is working i can go back to the rig and test the behavior and yeah i can work with that with more painting it can get even better it just takes time so take your time with the weight painting in the end maybe let's maybe fix this problem here so just create this pose where the problem is visible go to object mode shift select the mesh go to weight paint mode and control click on a deforming bone so if i enable x-ray here i can see the bones better i want to select the the lower leg bone and then if i disable overlays and just use the blur brush and blur a little bit you'll see that we basically fix the problem with just a little bit of blurring and if we move around we may find uh additional problems and you know you can still you can keep blurring or try a little bit of painting and it should become perfect so i hope you enjoyed this full workflow with auto rig pro we did spend some time on fixing weight painting issues this is very normal autoric pro does help a lot but some manual work is unavoidable and i wanted to make sure that you'll have all of the necessary tools to rig your first character with autoric pro

Channel: CGDive

Views: 92,882

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: nvjq7C9BbAQ

Length: 57min 22sec (3442 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2022