Bendy Bones "Slug" Rig in Blender

hi everyone i'm stefano from soto zen channel welcome to this quick tutorial as requested from someone of you in my last video i want to show you quickly how i rigged and animated my snail character using bendy bones in blender by the way i'm using the just downloaded 2.9 amazing version of blender let's press a and select all the elements in our default scene we don't need them and i want to go to autographic view pressing one on the numpad shift a and armature add single bond and this is how in blender a regular bond looks like this is if you go to the armature property tab viewport display this is an octahedral bond and in blender we have different kind of virtualization visualization for our bonds and octahedral stick envelope and wire they are they are all looking different but behaving in the same way all of these except the b-bone option and b bond stands for bendy bonds and when i select this option here and i enter the edit mode pressing tab we can easily and quickly see let's extrude a new bond placing e and z i can quickly see that if i select this bone in this area i can find this segment a slider that i can increase maybe to 12 if now i extrude another one and i move this bone around we can see direct that its behavior is very different and interesting and you can straight imagine how it can be usefully used to animate cartoonish stretching limbs arms or snake or in this case my little slug so let's continue building up our rig we have this first bone this one and this and let's add a new one again e and z to exclude a longer bond and finally we want another short one this we want also to subdivide into many segments maybe again 12 like this one and pressing ctrl alt and s i want to scale this in a narrow way this is only for visualization purpose it is more clear which will be our controller bonds that i want now to rename maybe this will be my head this in the center we can call our middle and this at the bottom maybe the base sorry base let's give it give a name also for the bending bones so maybe spine head and this one um spine base okay i want also press z and enter the wireframe mode to see it a little bit more clearly all my elements so now in edit mode the first thing we need to do is to select these two controllers and disconnect them from this hierarchy and i can do this pressing alt p clear its parent and also disconnect the bones if now i move this bone around it is no more connected to it's its friend here and i want to do the same with this center one clear and alpe also disconnect and this also you can see it is not more connected to the other one and we are done in edit mode let's enter pause mode in blender by the way you have free mode when you are dealing with skeletons the first one is the object mode where you have your hierarchy acting like all the other object and pressing tab you end you enter edit mode where you can duplicate add mirroring all your bones to build up your your structure your rig and then finally that is a little bit confusing for for example people like me that are coming from different 3d software this pose mode in pose mode you can see the color when you select the elements are changing the visualization is different and here you can add constraints but most importantly you can animate your element inserting keyframes for rotation or location or scaling so now here we want to set up some relationship between these bones and the first one that i want is this bone to be following this one so i select this first head controller and then i shift select the bending moment and pressing ctrl shift and c i have this quick access to this add constraint tab and under the tracking section i want to choose stress 2. now this turned green this means that some constraint is applied to it and if i now try to move it around i can see that my bendy bones is following properly and i want to do the same for this one so i select first the controller the middle one in this case and shift select this one again ctrl shift c and stretch two let's test it yes and is following now the problem is if i rotate my two controllers they are not working these bones are not following and this we can fix easily we have to again select our bendy bones and in the bendy bones property page at the bottom here we have this stat handle and hand handle properties and the first thing i want to do i cannot explain very well what's behind this but i tested a lot all of them we have different possibilities here but you see that this bendy bones is now spinning around around the epsilon the the y-axis in the word in the weird way that i don't want this to happen and as i said before i tested all of them and when i set this to tangent i find out that it is working in a good and solid way so let's select tangent for all of these two and with this selected i want the start handle to be the middle one and the end handle to be the head and now you see direct that the bendy bone is working in the proper way i want to do the same for this bone here so let's change these two options both to tangent and in this case this is a little bit confusing because it depends where the tail of your bone and the head of your bone are but maybe if it doesn't work for you try to switch these two options but for this bond the stat handle in this case i think is the base sorry the base yes and for the end handle will be the middle one so now you can see that we have this easy and very efficient very i don't know how to say very it worked very well for animate snakes or slug or something that have to move really in a cartoonish way so i want to now reset all our position and rotation to the rest to the default position and to do this i press a to select all the elements and with alt g i reset their position and with alt r i reset all the rotation let's go back to object mode and i want to rotate it 90 degrees and position it here i need now to enter again in edit mode because i want one uh last bone shift a to add this bond here that i want maybe to put it somewhere around here and this one will be the main controller for all our rig i can also rename this control global and i want these three bones to be parented to this last one so ctrl p make parent let's choose keep offset if i now go back to pause mode i can move around all my rig but it is i can still animate all its elements so let's reset again its position and one thing i forgot to do but it is easy to to fix is that this controller bonds i don't want to be deforming my mesh later so i select all of them and i uncheck this deform option under the bone property tab also the global controller and i want to be sure that the bendy bones are deforming so for these two this option must be checked and now we are ready our rig is set up let's put it to a test i can call this collection rig let's create a new collection that i can call snail or wall or slack whatever in this i can quickly append my character that i used for my latest animation so i go here here yeah object here let's go back to solid view this is way too big so s scale it down and also i want to rotate in this way and put it something like this now i have the problem that i can't see my bones inside this mesh i can easily fix this going to the armature viewport display properties and checking this in front x-ray vision so i can clearly see where my elements are and in my in my final scene i also set up some bones for the control of my antennas here so i don't do this now that it is not necessary but i think this will not behave in the in a good way but it's okay for the purpose of this tutorial so let's apply rotation and scale for this element and now what i want to do is select the character mesh shift select my rig ctrl p and bind them choosing automatic weights so if now i enter pause mode my character is deforming as i was expecting to let's try to animate it very very quickly i want sorry i need another window that i want to set up as graph editor i only need maybe 20 frame for this let's select our three controller bonds press i and insert a location and rotation keyframe for all of them one two three four frames ahead i want my slug to bend something like this let's insert another keyframe then one two three four five six frames of slowing down its action again one keyframe and and now quickly going forward only two frames maybe i want this worm to go fast forward so again i location and rotation and the last five of six frames let's make it go back to its original shape something like this and one final keyframe for all of them okay so now if i test my animation we can see that we have some weird behavior here as i said before but it's working in the right way okay guys i think this is where i have to stop for today i hope somehow you found this tutorial useful for you and if so please consider subscribing and liking this video please leave in the comment any question you may have i will try my best to answer them if you didn't do it yet i invite you to visit my main so to then youtube channel where you can find many animation and vfx video i made so thanks a lot for watching this i hope to see you again soon with another tutorial ciao

Channel: Stefano Milani

Views: 9,180

Keywords: Blender 2.9, Blender tutorial, learn blender, Blender 3d 2.9, b3d, bendy bones, character rigging, slug rig in Blender, how to rig, how to use bendy bones, bbones, blender rigging, 3d animation, cartoon animation, rigging in blender, how to animate a snail, how to animate a slug, hoe to animate with bendy bones, sottozen, stefano milani

Id: q6bdFPk6Y3E

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020