[Blender 2.8/2.9] Rig ANYTHING with Rigify #1 - Rigging for Beginners

this is the first chapter in this course which is titled rigged anything with rigify and in this course we are going to do exactly that we are going to learn how we can rig pretty much any character using rigify if you haven't watched the introductory video yet please check it out so let's get started with this first chapter in this chapter we are not going to be using rigify we are going to rig this simple character using the standard blender armatures there are two reasons I want to include this chapter first I want it to serve as a crash course in blender bones or blender armatures so for people who are not familiar you'll learn how to create bones manipulate them move them around pairing them how to set up constraints these things are done for us in rigify but it's still important that we know the very basics and the second reason is I want this exercise to serve as a comparison I want to be able to compare the standard workflow and the rigify workflow and then we can appreciate even more how fast and how efficient rigging with reify is so let's get started I'm just going to give this humanoid character a very simple rig so here we have our character I want to give him a skeleton so I'm going to press shift a armature and choose single bone okay then I'm going to go to this tab over here called the armature tab click that and expand viewport display and in there check in front and axis in front allows us to see our bones even when it's hidden behind or inside the character mesh and access gives us this axis here and that allows us to make sure that our bones are properly aligned so without further ado let's go to edit mode and start editing this bone I'm going to go to side view first let's see what we can do with this bone lender bones have these two nodules at the end of the bone and you can select them and move them around you move them like any other object in blender with the G key and you can also click inside the bone and then you can select the whole bone and that allows you to manipulate this bone again like any other object in blender you can press G to move it around you can press R to rotate it and s to scale it now I'm going to work with the nodules and I'm going to align the thick part of the bone around the pelvis area this part of the bone that did the bottom part is going to be aligned with the knee of the character and now I want another bone to create the shin of my leg so I'm going to press e to extrude another bone and that gives me a new bone that is connected to the previous to the first one okay so now I'm going to extrude another bone again with E and that will be the foot of the character and then one more and that will be the toe and it's always a good idea to keep your scene organized so right away I'm going to rename these bones there are a couple of ways to rename bones in blender one is to go to this tab with the bone tab at the top you'll see the name of the of the bone of the currently selected or actually of the active bone another way is to press f2 and that will give you this menu so let's rename the bone over here and I'm going to call this one Phi dot L now this suffix dot L is very important and I'm going to explain why in a second so let's click on the next bone and call it shin dot he'll the next one will be foot dot L and this one will be toe don't ille let's go to front view select all of these bones that we just created and move them in the x-axis okay so now we have an armature for our leg now I'm going to explain why we edit the dot L suffix really quickly I'm going to select this top bone and press shift D to duplicate it so that gives me a copy of this bone and I'm going to call this one test and I'm not going to add the dot L suffix so now I'm going to select all of my bones with by pressing a and then I'm going to click armature this armature menu and then choose symmetrize and as you can see all of the bones that hit the dot L suffix were mirrored on the other side of the character whereas this one with which didn't have the suffix was not so this suffix allows us to mirror our bones which is very useful when we have symmetrical character like like here so I'm going to press ctrl Z to undo because I want to symmetrize later in the process later on we are going to set up constraints for this leg to give it AI K controls and if I symmetrize now I'll have to set up the I key constraints twice and I don't want to do that I want to be efficient next I want to build the spine of the character I'm going to press shift a and that will give me a new bone right where the 3d cursor is located so this will be my spine so I'm going to select this bone press f2 and name it spine then I'm going to go to side view and scale it down about this size and then I'm going to press E and extrude three more bones so that I have four spine bones then I'm going to press E again to get another bone and that will the neck bone and one more is a head bone so my spine bones were automatically a name by blender as a spine zero zero one and so on now I want to name my neck as Nick and the head is head okay great and also because these bones are right in the center of the character they won't be symmetrized so I don't need to add the dot L suffix to them now I also want an arm so let's press shift a again and that will give me a new bone and I'm going to align the thick part with the with the shoulder the thin part with the wrist of the character then I'm going to select this whole bone click in the middle of it and select it I'm going to right click and choose subdivide and that gives me two bones so that's another way to get a chain of connected bones so here I'm going to select this last module of the arm and press E again and extrude another bone and that will be my hand so let's name our bones this one is upper arm dot L this one will be lower arm dot L and and dot L and let's go to top view the bones are well aligned but when you rig stuff like arms and legs make sure you always give them a little bit of a natural bend in the elbow or in the knee so here I'm going to move this nodule a little bit backwards like this and also let's go to side view and see the leg and I can see that it already has a little bit of a bend so that that's good so make sure it's not completely straight like this make sure it's a little bit bent like this so another feet most piped characters most humanoid characters should have is a collarbone so I'm going to add that now I'm going to press shift a this will give me a new bone I'm going to move it roughly where the collarbone is and I need to move it a little bit in the y-axis and I'm going to turn in front off for a second in front is very useful but sometimes it's a little bit difficult to gauge where your bone is exactly inside the character I want to move it just below the surface and then I'm going to turn in front on again and let's name this phone as well align it a little bit better and name it Koller dot hell another interesting feature that you can add to a humanoid character is pelvis bones so let's select this last module or actually the first module of the spine and press e to extrude another bone and extrude it sideways like this and this bone is just going to help us with the weight painting of the of the character if I don't have this bone then this leg bone will have too much of an influence over here in the pelvis area and and I have to I'll have to do a lot of difficult weight painting but with this bone that will speed up the process quite a lot and let's name this bone pelvis dot L now I need to parent my bones and so to perform parenting it's very simple you just select the child bone bone first then shift select the one that is going to be the parent and then you press ctrl P and in this case I want to choose keep offset in case you don't know what's the differences between keep offset and connected let's press ctrl P again and choose connected this time and as you can see my bone snapped the child bore bone snapped to its parent and so up until now we were extruding bones and what extruding does is basically performed connected parenting automatically okay next I want to parent this pelvis bone to the spine to the bottom of the spine so again select the pelvis then shift select the spine ctrl P keep offset then select the color and shift select the end of the spine and press ctrl P keep offset and then the upper arm shift select the color bone and press ctrl P and choose keep offset and now if I go to pose mode so in case you don't know edit mode for armatures is where you build the armature and pose mode is where you pose and animate it and so in pose mode I can rotate this bone here and I can see that it rotates everything with it this pelvis bone rotates the leg the leg I mean the thigh rotates everything below it same thing with the arm and then the collarbone so yeah everything is connected now and so I'm going to go back to edit mode I'm going to press shift a and that will give me another ball and now I want to go to side view and select the nodule in the thin part of the bone and let's see I'm going to I want to have increment a snapping selected and I want to turn on snapping and then move my bone down so it looks like this so it lies flat on the ground the reason I did this is because I want to align this bone with the orientation of the world the way I know that it's aligned with the orientation of the world is by looking at this axis that we turned on from here and if I look at the axis and then it this axis here if they match then we have a bone that is aligned with the world axis and so this bone is going to be my root bone with things like root bones you want them to be aligned with the world I'm going to press f2 and rename this bone root um let's turn on snapping because that will create problems and I'm going to press shift E and then Z to constrain the transformation to the z axis and then I want to make this bone a little bit smaller in the y axis something like this and move it more towards the spine okay and this will be my my pelvis control and let's do some more parenting I'm going to select this last bone of the of the spine then shift selected this newly created pelvis control P keep offset and then I'm going to select the pelvis and shift select the root and then control P keep offset and now if I go to pose mode my root moves everything with it my pelvis all moves everything except for the or the root and that's exactly what I wanted so that's great the base of my armature is looking good so next I want to set up ika controls for the leg just so we can practice setting up constraints a little bit so let's go to side view and select this module and press e to extrude another new bone and constraint the movement to the y-axis prep by pressing Y now when we extrude this bone it's going to be connected so I want to disconnect it and I can do that easily by pressing alt P and say clear parent there are a couple of ways to set up constraints in blender well first we have to go to pose mode select this new bone and let's press f2 and name it something let's say I K dot L so I have this bone selected neck next I'm going to shift select the shin bone and I'm going to press ctrl shift and C and I'm going to choose inverse kinematics okay so now in pose mode if I grab this ika control bone that I created and move it you see that something is already happening oh my this bone moves the whole chain of bones around that's not exactly what we want even though it's kind of cool so let's select this shin bone and go to this top and that is d bone constraints properties here when we pressed ctrl shift C and chose inverse kinematics this constraint was added to our bone and because we had this bone selected first blender automatically populated these areas the target and bone so this is a automation that happens when you use the ctrl shift C shortcut let's see what we can do about the behavior of the I K control under the I can constraint options there is this field called chain length and if you set that to two and then move your I K bone around you can see that it now only moves the shin and type five bones that's exactly what we want however the behavior is a little bit wonky you can see that the knee bends backwards and it's also kind of bad bends sideways so one way to improve this sideways rotation is to select this bone go to bone properties and then in the inverse kinematics look why and is it now how do I know that I want to lock y&z here again these access come in handy this may be a little bit difficult to explain but you can see that the x-axis is comes off the side of the bone when you get used to looking at this axis you will understand that your shin bone should rotate on the x axis another way to find out which access you want to rotate on is to choose the rotate gizmo and set it to local mode and then I can see that this red circle which is the red is always the x-axis is the the circle that I want to rotate my knee on these things a little bit difficult to explain and they take some getting used to so don't worry if it didn't make perfect sense right now and now if I move my bone again there is no sideways rotation of the knee but there is still a backwards rotation of the knee so we need to fix that now let's go to side view and then switch to edit mode and select D this module the knee and again press e to extrude another bone constrain the extrusion to D Y axis by pressing Y and now we have a new bone we want to disconnect it again so let's press alt P and clear parent and let's move this bone a little bit on the y axis and press f2 and rename this one Paul dot L there is a way to help blender figure out which way your niche should be rotating and that is done with this ball controller and so let's go to pose mode select this shin bone go to the constraints tab and under pull target choose first choose armature and then another field will pop up and in this field start typing pull and choose a pole dot L as soon as you select pole dot L your leg will be rotated in a weird direction and I don't know the exact technical reason that that happens but it does happen and the way you fix it is by playing around with this pole angle value if I rotate it to around minus 90 I can see that it looks almost okay and so let's set it to minus 90 if you've done something different than me then for you it might be another value but usually it's something like 90 or 180 a value like this now if I move my eye control I can see that there is no flipping of the knee unless I go very far towards this pole target then my knee will flip so let's go to edit mode and move this pole target a little bit further away like this and another we can do again in edit mode is to parent deport the poll target to the ika control with keep offset and then when we move the I K the poll target will move with it and also if we move around the pole target you can see that the knee the direction of the knee changes in it follows the pole target whatever wherever it goes so if you move a stuff around in pose mode you can always select all bones and go to pose clear transform all that will set up your bones in their default pose so next list let's try to select this pelvis control that we create it and see what happens this allows me to bend the knee of my character the only problem that I see here is that as my character ducks as my character's body goes down this foot rotates with it so let's see what we can do let's clear the pose and then I'm so I'm going to go to edit mode and select the foot of the character and press alt P and clear parent so now in pose mode if I move the pelvis around the let the foot stays put which is nice but if I try to move the I take control the food gets disconnected so there is an easy way to fix this I just select the shin bone then shift select the foot bone press control shift see you again for the constraints menu and choose copy location and your foot will move to the knee of your character but that's easy to fix just go to the constraints tab if you're not there and set this this property head-tail to one and now if I move the eye key control the foot moves you with it and if I move the pelvis control the foot stays put and that's great that's exactly what I wanted so there are many more features that we can add to a character but this is not this kind of detailed tutorial I just want to show you the basics so that we can work with rigify now that my armature seems to be working the way I want it I want to symmetrize the symmetrical parts of my character so let's go to edit mode then switch to front view and select all of these bones that need to be symmetrized so make sure you don't miss anything we need this pelvis bone we need the collar bone we want the shin and the food and the eye k and the toe and and in this poor target all of this we want to symmetrize so I have it selected now I'm going to go to armature and choose symmetrize and that symmetrized my bones so now if I go to pose mode and let's say move the pelvis control everything seems to behave as I as I expected to do if I move this bone then it moves the newly created leg which is great and if I remove the root it moves everything with it except for the eye key controls which I forgot to parent when you do manual rigging you need to make sure that everything that is not parented to anything else is parented to the root a bone so let's go to edit mode again and select these two high bones and shift select the root bone ctrl P keep offset and then if I go to pose mode I can move the root and it moves everything with it there isn't much left to do here we want to tell blender really quickly that some bones will be used to deform our mesh and others will be just control bones let's see which one our control bones the root bone for example is control bone it's not meant to deform your mesh in any way it's just meant to move the whole armature with it another control bone is the eye control and same thing with the pole target this pelvis control is a control in everything else will be just deforming bones I'm going to go to the bone tab look for this deform area and next to it there is a checkbox by default this checkbox is checked so let's select all of our control bones by shift-clicking and now here's a little trick if you hover over this checkbox and hold alt and click on it this will disable the deformations for all of the selected bones if you only click on it then only the last selected will get the change of property if I check my bones there all have deform and check if I verify the other ones which I didn't have selected they still have the deform property checked and that will help with the next step which is to set up automatic weights so I'm going to go to object mode select my character should select the armature and then press control P and as you can see this gives me a menu that's different than what we got in armature edit mode but blender does that a lot depending on your mode or your selection it will give you different options from here I want to select with automatic weights and now if I select the armature and go to pose mode and try moving my bones my mesh is deforming with my bones you can see how the Aiki works with the mesh now and so I did some changes to my mesh so I'm going to my armature so I'm going to press a to select everything then go to pose clear transform all and that will give me my default pose so this is what I wanted to show you in this tutorial actually posing and animating your character is a whole other beast and so the last thing I want to do here is set up some custom shapes for my control bones press shift a and choose circle and let's move this out of the way a little bit you can use any shape you want as a custom shape so to demonstrate that let's add another object let's say V R and I'm going to change some of the settings and move it to the side let's go to the rig now go to pose mode select the route bone for example go to the bone properties and look for viewport display and then find the custom object area and let's click here and select the circle my root bone became this circle that is easier easy to see and easy to select let's give the eye care controls the same circle as a custom mesh and let's give these poll targets the sphere and here this sphere is a little bit big so I'm going to select the both of these bones which now look like spheres and I'm going to hold alt and drag this property here and again this is the trick that allows us to manipulate multiple blender objects at the same time let's give this bone again the circle shape and that's more or less all I want to do now see this circle shape controls my pelvis movements and the route is controlled by this circle this circle here controls the i--came movements so that will be it for this chapter you can try to select the different bones rotate them around move them around and see what you what poses you can get so I hope that was an useful introduction to blend their armatures and if you want to learn more I'm going to include some resources that will point you to other tutorials but I think that should give you enough of a base so you can start working with rigify thanks for watching the next chapter will be available soon or it may already be uploaded details will be in the video description or just go to CG dot-com / rigify where you'll find the latest chapters additional resources and information about advanced lessons that I'm working on if you want to support me click like and subscribe you

Channel: CGDive

Views: 109,504

Rating: 4.9733586 out of 5

Keywords: 2.9, 2.90, 2.90.1, 2.82, 2.83, 2.83.1, 2.83.2, 2.83.3, 2.83.4, 2.83.5, 2.83.6, 2.83.7, 2.83.8, 2.83.9, 2.91, 2.92

Id: ERAScO1s8Zk

Length: 30min 42sec (1842 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020