Blender 2.7 Tutorial #39 : Custom Bone Shapes #b3d

hello and walk about 39 mph designees 102.7 in this video we're here looking at custom bone shapes my last two videos in part 37 and part 38 we created this custom I carriage for a Minecraft character if you wanna download this exact file I'm working on right now you can go ahead and find a link to that in the description below before we start talking about custom bone shapes I want to quickly talk about the way that I've changed this rig since the last video I want to go ahead and first clear up the pose of my character so in pose mode I'm going to press a + a to select all of the bones in the armature and I'll clear its pose by pressing alt r and alt G and alt s on my keyboard now for some reason behind I think it's because of some of the constraints that I have on some of my bones the pose does not clear out entirely when I press alt our adult s and I found that if I pressed those a few more times alt are an old G and L 2 s sometimes I take three times your pose will clear out that's one little glitch I found in this regen I'm not sure exactly why that is now as I was working on the UV map and the mesh of the character in the last video I pointed out that I made a few mistakes when I was positioning the edge loops some of my joints if I go to my front view you can see that now since last video I've corrected this edge loop around the elbow joint where these three had been slid down and you did not line up with the elbow joint I'm going to head it and make sure that all the sets of three edge loops for all B joints the ankle and elbow and knee joints they all line up properly as well as all the joints in the three spine bones I unwrap my character again and since the last video I've waked pinion and if you haven't seen the video on weight painting up or a link to it on the screen right now what I did was I went through and made sure the appropriate bones controlled the appropriate vertices in my mesh I'll go ahead and go back into weight paint mode now the one thing that I would go and change if I could go back in time is the way that I made these shoulder bones I'm not very happy with them because I don't like the that they attach all the way to the arm bone if I were to go back in time I would make these shoulder bones only go out to the edge of the actual body mesh because as you can see the way that I've weight painted is with that bone selected this bone only controls vertices in the shoulder if it also controls and it did this by default of course by parenting with automatic weights this bone controlled some of the vertices in the top of the arm and that distort the arm when you went to go and pose the arm or put the arm above the character's head it did not look good so I made it only affect these vertices the last thing or last way that I change this file is I added a constraint which stops the eye cabe owns in the armature from going way off into the distance a commenter on my last video pointed out that if I added a limit distance constraint to all of my eye cabe owns that would solve the problem of being able to lose these bones I'm going to show you how I did that so with any of the eye Kapaun selected if I go over here to the bone constraints tab you can see that added a new constraint called limit distance I'll go ahead and delete that and show you how exactly I added it so with this elbow like a bone right now I can grab it and move it way off into the distance and if I click I might lose it forever I'm gonna go ahead and press AAA and alt are and I'll GE and alt has to get it back if I want to stop that from happening with this both like an impost mode I can add a bone constraint called the limit distance constraint and it's right there so if I click that I can now specify a limit to how far can get away from another bone that I specify in this case I'm going to specify the upper left arm bone I think that's the one that's the most appropriate so I'm gonna click on target I mean it's nice if I armature and then I need to specify a bone so I'm going to click there and type in arm and it's going to be upper dot left and now I need to specify a distance I think by default it specifies the actual distance that it is right now in this case I believe it's 1.9 blender units which are the same as these tiles on the ground grid so I'll change that to maybe 4 and press Enter so now if I grab that elbow like a bone it gets stuck right there can't get farther away than four and you might want to set limits to whatever you think is appropriate in this case I'll change that to three so I've gone ahead and added that limit distance constraint to my two elbow I gave targets of course the knee targets as well I've added them to the hand I K bones and the feet I capons as well the next changes I made is I forgot to add a copy rotation constraint to my feet bone of course with the hand bones if I select the hand I K target and I press G for some reason the internal bones aren't displayed there it is right there but it's not showing up through that other bone that internal bone should copy the rotation of this outer eye cable that I've controlling so that the mesh deforms when I rotate it and so that all works great I forgot to add that in the last video so now you can see that this inner bone has a copy rotation constraint so it rotates along with the outer bone when I rotate that outer bone you might find I'm going to go ahead and clear this alt RL to you notice that when you do that the bottom of your legs might shear they might get twisted and I found that if I went into edit mode of my armature and I selected that inside foot controller bone that it had a roll on 90 or negative 90 degrees I just cleared that out and everything became good again the bone or the bottom of the feet no longer were twisted in that way that might be a clue if that's happening to you all right let's go down to custom bone shapes if you go ahead and download it anybody else's a Minecraft file or their version of this minecraft character and you saw their bones they probably looked not like these blocks they look like custom shapes the way we can do that is we can model any object we want and then make this bone look like that object so I'm going to go ahead and model a custom bone shape for this hand I cable what I'll do is I'll collect my 3d cursor over here and I'll press shift a and I'll add a new cube now of course I don't want my bones look like this cube so I'll press S and then Z on my keyboard to scale it down and what I might do is I'll go into edit mode and I'll grab the top back of the cube and I'll pull it up so that when we're looking at this bone and it'll look like a wireframe it won't look solid we can tell that the lower edges the front of the hand and the back edge is the back of the hand I'll go ahead and go to my front view and I'll grab it and move it to the actual mesh and I'll scale it down so it fits appropriately I'll put it right about there and B I'll go to my side view and move it to right about there so now we've got a custom bone shape I want to name this object so go over to my object tab right there and now it's called cube dot zero zero one I'm going to call this shape dot hand I K dot R it's the right side that working on right now I'll go ahead and duplicate that before I do I'm gonna apply the scale of this object so with this cube selected I'll go down to the object tab and or the menu rather and I'll click on apply I could use scale but I'll use rotation and scale in this case so now that this object knows its size I'll go ahead and duplicate it shift D and I'll click on X to make it move only to the side a little bit right about there and I'll change this name to our dot 0 0 1 2 dot L and I'll press Enter now that I have those two objects made I'm gonna select the bone that I want to look like that so this case I'll select that and a cable and I'll go up to the bone tab and under the display section we have this custom shape and I can point to any of my objects own so we'll click on that and I'll type in shape and I'll select the hand I Kedar and click now the bone did change shape it looks like the object we had right there that we modeled but it's only complete opposite orientation and it's the wrong size the reason why it's happening is because we scaled and worked with this bone before we made our armature had the constraints also this bone has its own local coordinates and if we go into the local gizmo you can see that the z-axis does not point up and down like this objects does this bone is not oriented the same way that this one is so I don't customize this object to work so it displays correctly with the bone what I'm first going to do is select the object and try to make it match how this bone looks so the bone looks the way it is and if we move this object nothing happens to the display of that bone so what I need to do first is let's see if we can rotate to make it look like that bone so I'm going to grab it over here and I'm going to rotate it our 90 and of course looking at my scene from the right so it rotated 90 degrees on the tour through the x-axis so it's like that and now I'll grab it and kind of put it where it is I'm going to press Z on my keyboard to go into wireframe mode and I'll scale that down with the S key and I'll move it around see if I can get it look approximately like the current state of the bone I'm doing this in object mode and that's very important because in a minute we're gonna flip over into edit mode I don't know it looks pretty good from that view let's go ahead and make sure yes so now my actual shape object is in the same place as the bone shape it's at this point that now I can edit the shape object in edit mode so still what that shape object that cube selected I'll press tab to go into edit mode and I'll select everything I can be in vertices select mode for this and now if I edit the vertices it'll also affect the bone so what I'll do is I'll go to my side view I'll press R negative 90 and as you can see well you'll see that the other shape is not there which means we're actually affecting now by being in edit mode the location and the way that the bone is oriented by being an edit mode of the object so now I'll go into my front view I'm going to scale this up sort of the same size as the actual mesh of the arm and I'll move that straight down I'll go to my side view and I think I'm going to move this a little bit forward and I think that looks pretty good I'll scale up just a little bit and that looks pretty good to me so now I'll go back into object mode press the tab key and I'll go back into material view so you can see it I'm going to take that object I can move it away in fact I'm gonna hide on a kind of a junk layer I'll press M on my keyboard and I'll move it down to this layer right here I'll call that my junk layer now that that object is him we don't worry about it ever again it'll be there I might want to go to my outliner window and find that bone and turn off rendering for it if I ever want to render this animation otherwise I'll just to go ahead and take a look at my armature as you can see now it has the correct bone shape M it's the right size and the right rotation I know do that one more time for the other side so you can see that process again I'm going to select my hand ikl bone and I'll go to the bone tab the custom shape I'm going to select shape to start with and local hand like a dot L and as you can see again it's in the wrong spot so in the object mode of the original shape object I'm going to position it and scale it so it's looking exactly the same as the bump I'll go into wireframe view our 90s just scale down I'll press G to move it to about the right spot and just do a little bit of finessing with R and G and s and I've got my front view and it looks pretty close to me right about there okay so this point go into edit mode so I'll press tab and I'll press a and a with vertices select mode turned on and I'm going to press R 90 whoops r negative 90 in this case nope r negative 90 there we go and I'll press s to scale that up you can see that they don't quite properly the line but this is a pretty rough process anyways there's no exact science to it as far as I'm concerned so I'll move that to about the right spot I'll make sure it's in the right spot from the front view it looks pretty good to me so I'll press tab to go back into object mode of my actual shape object and if I go back to this mode I can hide by pressing M on my keyboard and move the actual shape again to that junk layer so now if I look at my armature along with the mesh and we go back into material view you can see that we have the bones of the hands and they don't look like the original bones and this makes it more obvious to what you're actually working with so it's at this point that I'm gonna do a time-lapse and you'll see my end result in this video and if you wait for the next 30 seconds you'll get a prize at the end of this video alright so I'll finish my custom bone shape so a few more things to touch upon you might have noticed that as I was creating the custom bone shapes a few of the shapes especially the arrow rings for the hips and for the controller bone as well as the shoulder bones and the icater bones are made up of the circle mesh object I haven't talked about that yet in this video series so I'll touch upon that now if I go to my top view and I put my 3d cursor somewhere off to the side and I press shift a the circle object is not a 3d shape it's a just a 2d mesh it's made of vertices and edges just like any other mesh but there are no faces when it loads by default I believe it gives you 24 or 32 vertices which is the same number of edges if I press T to bring up my tool shelf you can see that at the bottom before I move or rotate or scale this out at all I can change my number of vertices to make my mesh either less round or more jagged or more smooth in a lot of these cases I use about 12 vertices to go around if you have a higher number that'll make your mesh unnecessarily complicated for just the bone shape to make these arrows I turn my bone or the circle vertices down so I will press 12 and then I might have gone into edit mode by pressing tab on my keyboard and I might have taken one of the vertices at one of the sides of the circle and I might have beveled it so I might have pressed ctrl V to bring up my vertices menu control-v and I'll press bevel then I can slide those two apart and then I can select that edge right there extrude that wood of course the e key and I'll press Y so it goes straight forward I'll press e again but I'll right-click this time and scale it out side to side e one more time Y to go straight forward and this time I'm going to select the vertices at the front and I'm going to merge them together so I'll select both those vertices W and merge and add Center ok so now I have an arrow if I go ahead under the object tab I name this I can apply that to a bone shape if I make it more salt or have two rings I can just go back into edit mode go back to my top view and add with in edit mode another circle and make it the same except scale it down just a little bit I'm going to do a great job with these ones but it does for this purpose I'll go ahead and delete the extra one that I made the last few steps I need to go back to that junk layer and I need to make sure that all these will not render out so I'm going to go over here to my outliner window with all these selected and I just need to click this little camera to make it grayed out so that you will not render out in the final version and that's again for all the objects that start with the word shape there we go and then we can forget about that layer forever I'll go back into material mode the last thing I want to do is I want to hide the bones that I no longer need to see I no longer need to see any of the arm bones or that internal hand bone so I'll select those I'll select the internal leg bones because you're never going to control them you're only going to use the eye Kate argot target so we'll hide these what else do we not need to see I think that's pretty good so I'll press M and that will yes move the bone selected to a different layer but these are not the same layers as our scene layers if I press M you can see their bone layers if I click to smooth them down here you can see that they're no longer there but under the person tab in our properties window you can see that a skeleton or armature has its own layers and that's why when you download let's say a fully finished armature from blend swap com that you might see only some bones and lots of other bone layers are hidden so we've got our hidden bones in this layer down here and what we want to see so now for an animator I can just control a mesh using the bones we can see and they're obvious of what they are even if I don't show my mesh even if I just have it looking like that I might know what I'm working on now I made these circles in the same way as the arrow hoops I just made a circle and duplicated a rotate a bunch of times to make this sort of an orb shape now I said there's gonna be a gift for you at the end of this video there is on the screen right now is a URL that you can type in and download this finished file complete with a texture and rig for your own purposes that's great let's video thanks for watching and I'll see you next time you

Channel: BornCG

Views: 28,140

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.7, Blender 2.73, tutorial, lesson, help, tip, trick, beginner, teach, learn, 3D, bones, bone, armature, skeleton, minecraft, character, steve, model, modeling, modelling, Blender (Software), animate, animation, animator, rig, rigging, shape, custom, edge, vertex, vertices, face, polygon, texture, software, computer, media, art, new media, dummies, cartoon, game

Id: 9WomIQ6hqmY

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 25 2015