Beginners Guide to Rigging in Blender - Pt. 1 The Armature Object

hello everyone dico here with another kick-ass walkthrough this is part one of a multi episode series that covers an introduction to rigging I'm going to show you how to build this a simple robot arm no plugins the paywall and no bull this first episode is for the absolute beginner so if you feel like you might be jumping into uncharted territory don't worry this series will give you the basics you need for bringing your own models to life because this is going to be a pure rigging series I'm not going to actually show you how to model anything however I will go into detail about what you should consider about a model before you start rigging and if you can't be bothered modeling anything and just want to jump right into the rigging process take the time to download this free model I've made and follow along okay we're going to approach this series with six broad chapters they are understanding what an armature is made of planning out rig building our binder rig creating mechanisms and finally creating our controls now if you're a complete beginner I want to say a few things before we start first is to be patient rigging is something that takes time to learn and understand so don't get too frustrated if you hit a brick wall take a break get some rest and come back to it sometimes the problems are staring right in front of you so okay to take your time secondly try to have fun with it trick rigging as a puzzle that needs to be solved and it will be all the more satisfying when things come together so if that being said let's get started [Music] okay so the first thing we need to do is distinguish what the difference is between an armature object and the components that lie within them all right so we'll just start off by creating a new armature object make sure your 3d cursor is set to the center of the world because that's where it will be built so shift a-rollin to armature and let's select a single bone all right so as you can see it's created a single bone and an armature object but if we expand this armature object in the outliner you'll see that it contains a few things one is the amateur itself and then the bones that sit within them and then it has the pose so the pose is basically animation data that we will add to that in the future an armature object can be edited in three ways one is in object mode but as we are now the second is in edit mode where this is where we would edit out armature to create new bones and lay out our actual armature for rigging and the third option is pose mode and this is where we would do all of our animation generally speaking the armature in object mode is basically a static object you don't really move it around it's anywhere in 3d space unless you really have to but for the most part if you're gonna move your armature around you'd be doing it in pose mode okay unlike other software out there in blender you don't just create multiple armature objects and then start stringing them together with parent connections and constraints doesn't work that way in blender all of your rig is housed inside an armature object so all the bones you create basically sit within the armature in object itself so if I tab into edit mode with the bone selected the armature is selected sorry and start duplicating for instance I can push shift D to duplicate bones is how we create our armature as we build out our rig we can also create new bones by pushing shift a and it will create a default bone wherever your 3d cursor sits in 3d space you can also extrude bones from one another into out of our other bones and you can also subdivided bones as well you can parent bones from one to one to another so I compare this one to this one by pushing ctrl P with keep offset so they actually keep the distance together or I can parent a duplicate bone to another bone like this one by connecting it using the connection parent relationship and that will actually link the bones together into a bone chain similar to what we've got here okay let's jump into edit mode and inspect what makes up a bone in blender so let's just zoom in just like that bone and jump into edit mode now a burn is comprised of three main elements one it's the head of the bone which sits at the base here the second part is the tail the third part is basically the bone as a whole so as a whole you can move the bone around I select English basically the shaft of the bird let's pop open the item tab on the side here and look at what we got here so in reality a bone is comprised of two joints connected by a child slash parent relationship the head bone determines the pivot the tail bone determines the direction in which the orientation of the bone is in 3d space now let's have a look at what I do what happens when I move the head around in 3d space if you look at the transform properties the numbers on the right side in the head properties are moving the same happens when I move the tail so if I move the tail around in 3d space it has its own individual ordinates in which it sits in 3d space now if I move the whole thing together they all move together with different values depending on where they sit in that 3d space and all of these work together to determine the orientation of the joint or argumentation up the bone in pose mode so let me demonstrate I'll just create a new bone and I'll edit it a little bit so it just has a bit of transformations on it I'll also create a second bone which I haven't touched now if I go into pose mode things may look a bit like exactly the same but there really are some differences for one I can't select the head and tail individually of these bones they are now working as a cohesive single unit the second part is that it now has a traditional sort of transformation attributes so as you can see it has location rotation and scale and this one also has location rotation and scale but notice how even though I've changed the direction of this bone in relation to this default bone the values aren't any different and that's because in edit mode we've changed its default space the resting pose of those bones basically this is important when it comes to rigging because it determines our default bind pose that we work from when we start our animations so everything has to start off at a zero point so therefore when we build our joints and our bones in now in edit mode it will be reflected as a zero state a zero point state in the UM the armature when it will start so to demonstrate let me just move this one around in edit mode I can move this around 3d space but again it has zero values but if I rotate this in local space in pose mode notice how it's inheriting some transforms now and if ice pop up into the rest position of our bones it goes back to its zero state they jump into our pose mode here we go back to our animated state we can reset those bones by pushing alt R or if you have movement alt G or if you have scale attributes you can push out s to reset those also take note of the pivot points of these bones and also the origin of the armature object itself notice how when we're in object mode that the origin of our armature sits in the center of our world where we created our rig to begin with if we jump back into pose mode notice how if I rotate the joint then it's pivoting from the head of the bone not the tail however the tail position does inform its local axis in 3d space so if I've pop up into global transforms you can see how in the global space it's matching our global position in 3d space if we switch open to local mode notice how the axes are following the direction in which the tailbone sits this tailbone actually is informing a lot of things when it comes to the rotation and pivot point of our bone it determines the twist and the rotations of those bones and this local sort of orientation is known as the burn enrolled in blender or I like to call it the button orientation so the orientation of the joints are super important when it comes to rigging and we'll get into that in more detail as we work through our rig but for our purposes at this point let me demonstrate what that means so again I'll bump into edit mode and create a new blank of joint I'm going to pop open the object data tab and then go you fault display and then click on axes notice how every bun has an individual axes this is really important in rigging because it determines the direction in which the bones will rotate in any given axes so for instance in this case let me just reset the pose here in our case notice how Z in on our default phone is following in this direction it Y is always facing in the direction of the head joint or a head joint of the bone and X follows in suit at a right angle to Z but also notice how despite the fact that this whole object hat is a single piece in pose mode each bone has their own direction and their own local rotation or default orientation to themselves we can change the orientation of this joint by affecting its role in edit mode so the role determines the direction of Z and X in its local space Y can never be affected in blender because it informs the direction of the bone as a whole so let's pop into edit mode and show you how to affect the role or the orientation of X instead we select the bone and notice how there's a roll attribute here if we play with that number notice how the bone theoretically rotates but it's not really rotating with literally just rotating the default orientation of this bone and if we tab back out into pose mode notice how now is X is now following in the same direction of Z that's only because of its local orientation let's do this with two default joints roll bones sorry I create a new one I'm gonna slide that to the side and X and create another one and then I create one more I'm gonna roll this bone 45 degrees 90 degrees in the positive I'm gonna roll this bone 90 degrees in the negative and I'm going to keep the middle one as the default if we pop into pose mode and now let's just quickly switch our rotation attributes to X Y Zed those short they're all set yep if I rotate this in Zed positive 90 degrees or positive 45 degrees sorry notice how it's rotating in this direction if I rotate this one in positive 45 degrees again on the Zed it's already turning in a different direction and again if I do that again on the third bone 90 degrees in the Z positive 45 sorry it's rotating in that direction and none of these are incorrect they're all rotating in the same amount along the z axis and that's only because we've changed the effective orientation of these bones and this will be really important again when we read because we want all our bones to have the uniform sort of orientation when we start rigging especially along things like arms legs and the spine and again we can reset the pose by clicking alpha let's reset the orientations of these three these two joints here these two bones it's like both of them and we could actually use a shortcut to actually bring it back in line with our default bone so to do that select our three joints my three bones and we select our the one in which we want the orientation to be matched across all three bones last and then we click on shift in shift and brings up a new little pop-up and then we can say a line or recalculate the role to the last selected bone so we click that and now they're all back to that default sort of orientation all right I think that's enough for today in the next video I'm gonna cover the top six features of a good rig but until then caches

Channel: Dikko

Views: 91,802

Keywords: Blender, tutorial, learning, lesson, 3d, rigging, blender 2.8, b28, novice, beginner, maya, dikko, robot, animation, cgi, vfx, computer graphics, 3d animation, tute, tut, education, how do I rig, rigging in blender, 3D rigging

Id: cxlPWv9giR4

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SuperGreenAnim]

So here we go guys, part one! Pretty simple stuff for this one, but you really gotta start from the ground up when it comes to rigging. I hope you find it informative!

Be sure to download the actual finished example rig after you watch the video!

[u/RydenJ]

Great and easy to follow!