BASICS OF ANIMATION - Blender 2.8 - Part 3 - Bones & Armature

hello and welcome to gaba media I'm grant Abbott and today we're going to be taking a look at the basics of animating with bones and armatures this is all part of a much bigger course on the basics of animation you can find other free courses on my website and you can also join in the animation challenge which is an animation challenge for the month of May details on this and everything else can be found in the links in the description now this is not a rigging tutorial I've got other tutorials on that and I'll put them in the links in the description but this is just so you understand the basics of bones and parenting so here's the basic start up file and we're going to make a basic snake so I'll take the default cube go into edit mode with tab and you can see my shortcut keys down the bottom here and I'm just going to scale this up in the x-axis so s then X and scale in the x-axis now if I wanted to add lots of bones for this and make this a snake type creature it won't work at the moment because the bones will only animate the vertices so this won't Bend because it has no vertices in the middle so what I'm going to need to do is press ctrl R to do a loop cut use my wheel and create lots of loops double left-click to set those and now I've got lots of vertices to deform I'm going to make my snake a bit longer actually so I'll tap aide to select all and scale in the X again so now we've got a bit more of a snake so back into object mode with tab and I'm also going to add a subdivision surface modifier by pressing ctrl - that adds a subdivision surface modifier with two levels so I want to set up some bones to attach this snake to and the bones will act like the snake's skeleton so when the skeleton moves the skin or the mesh will move with it so what we do we go to add shift a for short or you can go up to add top here and you'll find it under armature and there's single bone there's some other useful stuff as well but single bone is what we're going to use at the moment and you can hardly see it it's in the middle there the first thing to do is make that visible through our object we can go to the object data settings or the armature settings and go to viewport display and there's an option in front this used to be called x-ray in 2.79 so we took that and we can see our bones now let's get to front view with one on our numpad and I want to create lots of bones along here as if it's the spine of my snake so let's grab this bone in the x-axis and move it across for the front and there's three modes for bones there's object mode there's edit modes and there's pose mode object mode and edit mode are the same as mesh objects so ones for grabbing the whole object and ones for editing the individual bones in this case but lastly there's pose mode and that's what you use to animate let's go into edit mode for now and you can grab different parts of your bone I'll just zoom into it a little bit by pressing full stop on my numpad to zoom into my object and you can grab both ends or the whole bone in this case I'm going to left-click and grab the top end G to grab it and move it into position about there let's zoom out again now that's great and then in the same way you do with objects you press e to extrude and you can pull out another bone and I'm going to constrain it to the x-axis as well so either X and I'll just make my bones go across the middle here so I've gone half way not particularly even but you can go in and you can edit these points so G then X and you can edit points if you need to and you'll notice as well that all these are attached to each other at the moment what you can also do I've done half my bones so I'm going to copy and paste these to the other half so let's select them all I'll do beatbox select just get that last one as well and then shift D duplicate and bring a load to the end now these two bones aren't attached as you can see and that will make a difference so if I go to pose mode now you'll see that not only these bones attached but they're parented so if I turn this one's with rotate you can see that it rotates all the other ones if I rotate this one it rotates the other ones further down the line because they are parented to one another so that's parented to this one and that one to this one and that one to this one and so forth so if I select all my bones now and press alt R that removes all their rotations but I've got a problem because this one is not attached to this bone here and it needs to be attached in a long line so I can move my snake from its tail so let's go back to edit mode and parent in the normal way so select the first bone that you want to attach and lastly the active object the one you select last that's the one you're parenting to and then press ctrl P for parent and in this case we're going to go connected so it'll suddenly move across and connect together now it's also worth pointing out that if you duplicate a bone let's duplicate this one for example can you see this black line down here that means it is parented and there's an offset to the parent so if I go into pose mode now and if I rotate this one you can see that this is still a child of this one and that's what that black line there means so let's undo that movement you can remove parents by in edit mode pressing alt P and clear the parent back to pose mode and now it's not attached I'll quickly go back to edit mode and delete this bone by pressing delete and then bones and I've got my basic rig for my snake setup here so how do I attach it to my mesh so that the mesh is deformed when I move the bones in the same way you normally parent things so back into object mode we select our mesh first and then the bones second so there'll be the active object and there for the parent and press control P the easiest way is with automatic weights which is selected there and that will set up what are called weights I'll quickly show you what's meant by weight so I'll click on my object and I'll go to weight painting mode and you can see this bone I had selected here is influencing this area in red and it's not influencing this area in blue and these different shades of blue green and yellow are the sort of in-between areas and you'll see what that means later so back to object mode now let's go to our bones now if I go to edit mode and move this around it won't move my mesh I have to be in pose mode and then you can see my mesh starting to move I'll undo that you should also be able to see the influence of the weighting so let's go to the bone we selected before rotate and this is the area that was in red and this is the area that was in blue and these in-between bits are being slightly affected by this bone but also being slightly affected by this bone as well hence the slight distortion and that's always a problem and good weight painting will stop these sort of weird distortions and pinching but it is quite tough especially with sort of low poly characters with thick areas like this so how can we animate this well in order to animate you must be in pose mode having said that you can actually be an object mode insert a keyframe move along a bit so 10 frames grab your whole object and insert another keyframe for location and you can move your whole object which is fine and kind of has its place I'm just going to undo that but generally you do all your animation in pose mode it is the case that if we set up let's say a weird walk cycle for our snake we could set up the cycle repeat it but then we could move the whole object along in object mode and animate that and that would save us having to repeat each cycle of the walking so it does have its place to animate in object mode but we're going to stick to pose mode what I'm also going to do is bring up my dope sheet as well and in fact I will bring out another one for the time line so I've got my record buttons in the middle there so let's animate our snake sort of moving up in some way now I'm not suggesting this is the best rig for a snake there's probably better rigs out there but this is just the very basics so let's make a move upwards and then strike at something if he was some kind of adder so this is a good base position so if we select all our bones and press I and I'm going to keyframe the location and the rotation now it does seem kind of pointless keyframing the location for these pieces along here because if I press G to grab they can't really move anywhere they only rotate whereas this is the only one that can actually move I'm just using location and rotation so that I can quickly select them all with a and then press I lock rot and it's more out of habit because a lot of the time you do have are much is that need movement as well as the rotation so there's my first keyframe on frame one so let's say he takes a second to move upwards so that's about 25 I turned to work in PAL which is 25 frames per second but I think the basic settings if I go over to output are for film which is 24 you can't change it to 25 I find it a bit easier with 25 because it's easier to think about seconds in multiples of 25 rather than 24 and have to try and add up 24 so he's going to move up after 25 seconds so let's start rotating things so he moves up into this weird position and then a to select everything and I to set the location rotation now it'd be easy if I had my record button on so let's do that now for the next one we want this to be quite quick so he strikes out very fast so that can be for now we'll say half a second so somewhere around there and we'll do the strike motion and I'm just selecting the bones and rotating them and because I had records selected it's recorded all that rotation now because I've set record we've probably got some extra keyframes in here yes we've got the scale as well we can delete those channels later on that's not a problem so it's struck out there and let's just scrub along a timeline with right click and see what's happening and we wanted to go back to this position here so we can just duplicate this keyframe shift D to duplicate and move that to frame 50 so we've got a two-second animation let's bring our end to 50 over here so that we can loop it and I made a mistake there because I only had one bone selected so here I've got one bone selected so I only duplicated that one bone so now if I select all now if I go to the dope sheet summary at the top there shift D select all those bones move them across that's a bit better okay that's a very slow striking snake it's more a worm strike so what we can do is we can select the top keyframes move our playhead to here and then scale them in with s and let's see what that looks like that's more like it isn't it or dangerous snake and just as a quick reminder remember your output settings if you really wanted to show off what you'd done your output settings are here so don't go straight into the temp folder and if you want to change it to a film format ffmpeg video encoding and h.264 is the most commonly used and probably the best for compression and file size so there we have it the very basics of animating with bones in the next session we'll be talking about characters and how you can understand more complex rigs thanks for watching and I hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 308,629

Rating: 4.9344578 out of 5

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, sculpting, sculptor, sculpt, painting, rigging, animation, bones, armature

Id: IAiTYaiZmY0

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2019