BASICS OF ANIMATION - Blender 2.8 - Part 4 UNDERSTANDING RIGS

hello and welcome to Gavit media I'm grant Abbott and today we're going to be looking at rigs looking both at Ford kinematics and inverse kinematics and how you can understand complex rigs that you might download to use this is all part of a much bigger course on the basics of animation and do remember there's the animation challenge which you can get involved with all the links are in the description and you can go to my website for more information also if you want to learn more about rigging you can watch my reading your basic character tutorial series and I put the links in the description for that as well here I've got two very basic rigs or armatures in my scene and I've created those using bones I'll quickly give you a reminder of how I did that so I'll move my cursor over to here shift a to add an armature and then a single bone and then into edit mode and extruding bits out and moving bits so let's say the arm there and this need to move down and then legs and so on and so forth so I'll delete that in object mode and let's go back to these two rigs so the first rig is a Ford kinematics based rig and that's the most basic type of rig so if I go into pose mode now and I wanted to pose this model I can rotate different areas to give them a different pose it looks like he's playing a bit of football and his leg is very distorted he's obviously been in a bad tackle but I can't move my objects I press G to grab and it still rotates the only one I can move is the base bone which is there and I forgot to parent those so I can move these ones as well because they're not parented to anything just there's a quick reminder about that let's go into edit mode which brings my armature back to its resting pose grab those two grab the middle bone and ctrl P if I do connected it will move my objects to the end of the bone which I don't want so it'll be ctrl P and then keep offset and it's got that offset then now if I go back into pose mode we'll see my weird pose and I can grab this middle one and it will have everything connected so quick reminder about parenting so Ford kinematics is very basic and it's just where you rotate the bones to get the different positions and in a sense that's not so bad because all our bones generally speaking apart from a couple in our body are all connected so they do just rotate around a sort of hinged joint so theoretically speaking you should be able to get all your poses you need from this the difficulty comes when I'm trying to do a walk cycle so let's select everything and alt are to remove all the rotations and we're back to the start so I want to do the walk cycle I'll isolate my model with forward slash on the numpad so you can't see anything else so there's no distractions and let's have been walking along a floor so I need a floor in here let's just quickly go to object mode add a floor in and move it into position so first of all would make him squat slightly to give him a starting pose so let's get back into pose mode with our armature grab the middle and pull him down oh now our feet are sinking into the floor so we'll have to grab those and pull them up but I'm gonna have to rotate the leg in fact aren't I so I have to rotate the leg like this then move the foot down so you can see that awkwardness I'm having already I can't just grab the foot and move it upwards I have to figure out the rotation of these different legs in order to make it work so we've got a sort of walking pose there so I would select with my bones I lock rocked although generally for 40 kinematics you can do just rotation but let's put record on as well and then after one second we'll copy this frame shift D the duplicate so he's gonna move across one cycle in one second so this will be a looping animation so we go to the middle and we want an exact replica at this so you can mirror them of course I'm just going to show you the complexities of this so I'm rotating and putting the foot into place and then rotate this one foot into place okay so we've got a keyframe and he's walking brilliant stuff let's get to our in-between frames somewhere around here now our feet are sinking so obviously we need to lift him upwards because there's an up-and-down motion if you look at walk cycles so we're gonna grab this one in this head axis and move it up and we're gonna have the same issue here where they meet so we'll copy that keyframe shift D move that across and in the middle he's floating so we can move him down okay so we got this and his feet are sort of working let's just end my frame at 25 so we can see the loop oh that's a brilliant walk cycle but the awkwardness is that the feet aren't always touching the floor and I'm having lots of problems getting to stay still that's where inverse kinematics comes in so let's press full slash on the numpad to get my rigs back and back into object mode let's go across to the other rig now now this rig has inverse kinematics if you need to know more about how to set that up I do have a tutorial links in the description let's go to pose mode and you can see that if I grab my middle bone the arms and feet keep their positions roughly anyway it's not a particularly good rig and particularly good inverse kinematics but it will hopefully illustrate the point I just couldn't go back into object mode so I can get my floor and you plate it and bring it across so there's a floor for him or her so object mode with the armature and back into pose mode so the walk cycle for this let's squat them down a bit grabbing the Zed axis there and I'm going to move this one forward grab in the Y and this one backwards grab and the Y can you see how much quicker it was for me to set up my armature I can now rotate this one in the X copy that keyframe shift D and then let's go to the middle I will quickly show you if you select all pose menu copy pose pose menu paste flip posed that would normally work but I completely forgot I haven't labeled my bones properly so that definitely won't work I think you have to have the right naming conventions and I was being lazy so let's just forget that and let's push them into position - a quick time-lapse with me key framing okay after a bit of fiddling about I finally tidied it up and he's moving up and down but his feet are sticking to the floor so hopefully you can see from this angle that this one pops up and down and the legs are going with it but this one's legs are sticking to the floor so that's where inverse kinematics are quite important especially when it comes to things like walk cycles where you want something to stick to something else so like a foot or if a hand maybe you're doing a handstand and you want the hands to be pressed against the ground now you can probably see some other slight issues the leg goes in a funny angle here this is what's called the pole angles so I'll just pause my animation and move this around I'll turn record off first now and you can see this is a pole angle and with inverse kinematics that's where the knee or the elbow points and the same in here you have a pole that tells you where the middle of your chain is pointing so you've got a pole and you've got a control bone so it's not the hand bone this is the hand bone and this is the control bone and if I grab this this one disconnects but that controls my movement and wherever I'm moving this around to the pole targets the elbow stays in that position and when I move my base bone these control bones are stuck in position so they don't move together of course you can select everything and move it all together that way and some people like to have a sort of roots bone where everything is connected and parented to that and they move that route bone to move the whole armature so how can we understand rigs that we import let's import a rig I'll just go to object mode so it doesn't mess things up and put my cursor in the center roughly and then file append now here I've got the Mac file which I got from blend swap and that's fully copyright free so you can use in your projects even paid projects so if I go to the base file there and click on that and then click on the objects and I'll just select everything for now and a pen from libraries so it's brought in everything into my project I'm going to get rid of the floor and the light and just have a look at this section here let's get rid of the camera for now as well so this looks incredibly confusing and this is often the case that when you bring in characters they've got quite complex rigs they're very good rigs often but they just take a bit of figuring out so let's try and click on path to the rig so where do I click let's try this one okay I know that's not a rig because it's not got lots of bones for example and it's not got anything attached to my character so I'm actually going to delete that for now and this one as well so they don't get in the way because I know they weren't part of the rig let's try this bit here now suddenly I've got lots of things selected so that's probably my rig and if we come across here and press full stop on our numpad you can see Mac armature so we know that's the armature for Mac so everything else in this case we can probably delete I'll grab Mac as well with Shift and grab Mac and then move them across the side grab in the x-axis G then X and we can see all these bits here that we probably don't need so let's try box selecting them and delete and yes it looks like I didn't need any of those things so let's go back to Mac here with full stop on my numpad or period key on my numpad and take a closer look at the rig now this doesn't look the same as mine which have these bones but what they've got is different objects representing the bones so they've got display bones in a sense let's go into pose mode let's see what we can do now they've also color-coded so the left side is green and the right side is red they've got a nice iRig let's start moving things around so I'll press G to grab and I've got these eyes at the frontier and that will make my eyes move and they've also got these things so I can resize my eyes which is quite fun so I'm just pressing G to grab and it's resizing them let's start looking at the bone so we've got some in blue and some in yellow so let's grab this nothing happens let's rotate this it's stuff is sort of happening so let's grab the blue ones we got more happening there so hopefully I'm working out the color coding that the blue seems to have a fair bit of influence but these yellow options don't seem to be doing much let's grab the green and the red so there's a green over here and that's obviously my control I cabe oh and I can move that around and there's the pole for that and that means the elbow and that's gonna be the same for the foot down here let's grab that and the foot over here and there's my pole targets again we've got a couple more down here we've got the green one there and there so let's try rotating that and that's the foot role I was talking about let's to constrain that to the x-axis and you can see the foot rolling quite nicely what does this one do at the end here I'm rotating that around the x-axis and we got that pivot point right at the end very useful stuff but we've still got these yellow bones and that's the forward kinematics so if I press G to grab it's not doing much at the moment and generally speaking a good rig you'll be able to switch between AI k and FK so Ford kinematics in the yellow here and in the different colors you've got AI K I would suggest for beginners you choose one or the other so personally I'd rather stick to Ike a because it enables me to animate a lot faster but I won't be complicating things by switching to the FK which is the yellow so basically in this rig I'm going to leave all the yellow alone and move around the AI K there's also the bones in blue they are Ford kinematics and I'll be using those but they're not interfering with my inverse kinematics which on the end of the limbs here so that's fine for me to use those and it won't interfere you've also got these nice shoulder bones oh yeah and lastly we've got one base bone that we can move the entire rig with so that's like the route bone and in fact they called it the route up there so that's how you can take apart more complex rigs hopefully that's not too confusing it's mainly about practice downloading some rigs seeing what you can do with them seeing if you can understand them if you don't understand the first one you come to try another one see how you get on with that have some fun do remember to sign up to the Facebook group or discord server to get involved with animation all the links are in description and the links with my Facebook are on my website in the next episodes we'll be going over facial rings thanks for watching and I hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 122,315

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, sculpting, sculptor, sculpt, painting, rigs, complex, download, ik, fk, kinematics, invers, forward

Id: nlT9rYcIRzU

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2019