[Blender 2.8/2.9] Rigify Tutorial #08 - Posing the Rigify rig

in this video i want to go over how we can actually pose our character using the generated rig until now that was a serious shortcoming of this course basically i showed you how to create a rig and not how to use it i'm going to use this character that we rigged together and i'm also going to provide this file okay so first i'm going to give you a basic overview of what the rig controls do in the later part of this video we are going to try to actually pose the character okay so i'm going to select my brick and go to pause mode and you will be presented with this jumble of shapes and if you're confused that's understandable so one thing that we can do to clean up this rig a little bit is to hide all of the tweak layers so make sure the end panel is expanded and you're in the item tab and then simply click on each layer that says tweak on it and that will disable all of our tweak layers or tweak controls and that will give us a cleaner rig to work with so i'm going to try to explain each of these controls one by one and i think i'm going to start from the arm and then the legs a lot of people are confused by the controls there so let's start there in the arm you you'll see that there is a set of red controls and green controls if you select this widget at the hand and move it your arm will move and then if you try to select the green widgets and move them or rotate them nothing seems to happen and i think that confuses a lot of people one thing that i'm going to do very often is select all bones and then go to pause clear transform all to reset my rig to the default position so what are these screen controls and why do they seem to do nothing basically the arm in rigidify offers both ik and fk control and it allows you to switch between the two and by default all limbs in rigidify are set to ik that's why moving the red controls which are the ik will deform your mesh and moving the green ones currently won't it is easy to switch from ik to fk and back make sure you're in the item tab if you just slide this ik fk a slider all the way to one and then try to manipulate the the green widgets then your character will deform and then moving the red widgets will do nothing just in case you don't know what fk and ik is fk stands for forward kinematics and ik stands for inverse kinematics ik and fk are two different ways to manipulate a chain of bones fk is basically the default behavior of blender bones if you create a chain of bones in blender the bone at the top of the chain controls the bones further down the chain the first bone controls all of the rest the second bone controls all the bones after it and so on and so forth let's go back to the rig and switch the pose mode so this is how the hand behaves currently rotating the upper arm rotates the lower arm rotating the lower arm rotates the hand and the hand itself is the end of the chain so it doesn't affect anything after that let's select any of these widgets and go back to ik mode by sliding the slider all the way to zero and now if i move this widget it will adjust the position and rotation of my upper arm and lower arm so this is the behavior of ik or inverse kinematics it's basically the opposite of forwards kinematics you manipulate the end of the chain and the rest of the bones up the chain adjust their positions based on certain mathematical rules and don't worry as as a user as an animator you don't really need to understand the mathematics behind inverse kinematics now you should understand what ik and fk is and you should understand how to switch your arm between ik and fk mode another thing that may confuse you is this cogwheel widget since it's red you may think that it has to do with ik but really it doesn't have any functionality it just holds all of the options for this limb if i select any of the actual ik widgets then in rig main properties i'll get all the options that have to do with ik if i select an fk widget then i get the options that have to do with fk and if i select the cogwheel then i get all of the options whether they are for ik or fk and personally i rarely use this cog wheel so i can either hide it or move it to another layer if you don't use it then feel free to hide it from your interface now we are in ik mode so let's explore the rest of the ik options and controls as you already understand moving this widget will move the whole arm around if you rotate this widget it will rotate the the hand so by just selecting this widget and moving and rotating it you can almost perfectly position your arm the only thing that you cannot do with this widget is is to control the position of your elbow uh to control the position of the elbow you need to select this uh widget that looks like two arrows and you have to use rotation and that will adjust the position of the elbow if you remember chapter two the introduction to uh blender armatures i showed you how to set up an ik leg and there we did set up a pole target which control the knee of the leg and you can have the same type of pull target in rigify all you have to do is have an ik widget selected and then click this toggle pole button and that will show you this additional control when you do this you won't be able to manipulate these arrows anymore now the control over the elbow is in this widget rather than rotating this widget you have to move it and that will adjust the alignment of the elbow and this type of pole target is is considered the classical way many people prefer it i prefer it as well the last option that i want to show you when it comes to the ik controls and ik options is this ik stretch option right now it's set to one and now if i grab the hand widget and move it once i extend past the length of the arm my arm will start stretching and that's that can be great for cartoony animations but if you try to achieve realistic animations you may not want that so all you have to do is slide the slider all the way to zero and then the widget will just keep moving but the arm will not stretch so that's about it for ik controls let's slide the ik fk slider to 1 and that will move the control to the fk control notice how because the position of the ik and fk controls is slightly different the arm gradually moves to the fk controls in a minute i'm going to explain how we can seamlessly switch between ik and fk but let's first look at the actual fk controls as i already said controlling fk is fairly simple it's basically the default way in which you control bones in blender and because this is an arm the most common action that you'll do is rotating the arm now i'm going to hide all of the other widgets except for my arm so that we can see what's happening better so yeah the movement of the fk controls is fairly simple you just grab the part of the arm that you need and you rotate it you can also scale it for cartoony effects but generally you need to rotate it now let's unhide the torso to demonstrate the fk limb follow option currently it is set to one i'm not sure if that's the default but it doesn't matter we are going to look at both behaviors so i'm going to select this chest widget and actually first i'm going to clear the transforms of the the arm so that it's straight and let's also hide the ik controls okay let's move to the front view and make the arm completely straight like this now i'm going to grab the chest and rotate it you will notice that the arm stays completely straight all the time and that is uh thanks to this fk limb follow option if i hit it off and then i rotated the chest you'll see that the orientation of the arm changes initially it was straight now it's this and if i select the arm and slide it back to one you'll see that it will go to its original orientation again this option is very useful and it helps us avoid having to counter animate counter animating means that we have to animate something twice and when we start pausing the character i think you'll see better how this is useful so let's select all bones and clear the transform again with that we covered how to use the r in ik and fk now the last thing i want to show you here is how to seamlessly switch from ik to fk let's create a pose for the fk arm and now if i click this ik to fk button the ik controls will snap to the current position of the afk of the fk controls and now if i slide the ik fk button all the way to zero then i'll be back in ik mode and it will be seamless cool now i'm going to unhide all of the controls except for the tweak controls clear my pose and so we just explored the arm that will make exploring the the leg extremely easy because the controls are almost the same by default the leg is also in ik mode so if i grab the foot widget and move it i'm going to move the whole leg and if i rotate it i'm going to rotate the foot around the ankle again if i slide the ik fk slider to 1 i'll i'll be able to move the leg in fk mode again the fk has a similar fk limp follow option if i have it all the way to 1 and i rotate the pelvis for example or the torso in this case then the fk leg will preserve its orientation whereas having this option off will kind of act as if the leg is originally connected to to the body so the basic options are exactly the same you can again toggle the pole and have the classical uh pole target if i switch to ik again you can snap ik to fk and fk to ik what i didn't show you in a second ago is that you can also snap the fk to the ik it works exactly the same way and then you can slide the slider and be in fk mode now let's make sure that we're in ik mode there are a few differences between the arm and the and the leg the leg has this heel control if i select rotation and make sure that i'm in local transformation rotating this on the x-axis will roll the heel around the toes and if i rotate it backwards then then i can raise the whole leg around the heel and if i rotate it in the y axis i get this sideways roll of the foot and there is one more widget and it allows you to rotate the foot around the toes so this widget will rotate the foot around the ankle and this widget rotates it around the toes so with that we covered the controls for the for legs and arms and you may be wondering why do we have both ik and fk controls that is because each mode has its pros and cons ik is great when you need to pin the hand or the foot in space for example for the legs you will often want to keep them to ik and that will allow you to plant the foods firmly firmly on the ground right now both of my feet are in ik mode if i grab the torso and just move it you see that the feet stay firmly on the ground and so as long as your character is in uh is staying on the ground you you will probably want the ik the legs to be ik now if he suddenly starts flying in the in the air you may want to switch to fk the arms on the other hand you may want to keep them to fk and that is especially useful when you are animating let's say a walk rotating the upper arm gives you this natural swinging motion of of the arm but of course there are also situations where where ik may be preferable for example when your character is pushing against something i have the torso selected and i'm going to i have the torso selected and i'm going to turn off overlays to see what's happening better and now if i move the torso you see how the the hands stay in place as if they're pushing against a wall okay let's look at the torso controls we did manipulate this big boxy widget already a little bit this simply moves the whole torso with it then we have the hips control which gives you this swinging motion of the hips this can be useful to simulate shifting the weight from one leg to the other and in the side view it gives you this twerking motion what this widget actually does is it rotates the lower the lower half of the body and it gives it a curve and the chest widget does the opposite it curves the upper part of the body this is the neck control and i think by default the head follow option is set to zero so this is similar to the limb follow option in the hand however the value seems to be inverted in the limbs a follow value of 1 will preserve the orientation of the limb but in the head a follow value of 0 preserves the orientation of the of the head i'm not sure what it is it seems like a bug or a little bit of an inconsistency in rigidify but anyway uh this circular widget at the top it controls the actual head rotation and here because i added ears i have ears controls another important control is the clavicle or shoulder if if you rotate it you can get this shrugging motion and also as many people will point out if you try to animate something when the human arm raises above this level this will automatically start raising the shoulder so if you want to achieve natural motion when you raise the arm of your character always also consider the shoulder or the clavicle these controls here are breast controls a character is rather male so in this case we won't use them much you can even move them to another layer or hide them then we have a tail if i select any of the circular widget along the tail i can manipulate the part of the tail that comes after that widget so this first widget will kind of rotate the whole tail the second one will rotate this part and so on and so forth one thing that you will notice is that there is a little bit of automation going on if i rotate the tail up the whole tail curves automatically if i look from the top and again rotate the tail you'll notice that no such automation no such curving occurs and that has and that is set up inside the metaric options if i go back if i unhide my metarig select it go to pose mode and select the tail you'll see that this x option is activated and this is what creates this automatic curving and that is only when you rotate in the x-axis if you activate z then you will have automatic curving as well for the uh in in the z axis and if you activate white and also on the bones on success you will have an automation i'll keep that to the default of x and hide the meta rig and the last widget that you have for the tail is this one and this widget only rotates the tail in the automated axis so in this case only in the x-axis you'll see that i cannot rotate it in the in the z-axis or in the y and so if if you set up no automations then this widget won't do anything in my advanced course i have a part which is called the manual and there i explain all of these options in a lot of detail i also explain all of the options for all of the rig types so if you're interested in that check it out i'll put a link in the description now let's explore what the tweak controls do and then we can move to actually pausing the character so now just unhide all of the tweak layers and you'll see spherical widgets appear all over the rig i'm going to change the viewport shading to solid so that we can see that better the blue material kind of blends with uh with the widgets so switch to solid mode and then we can see them so these tweak bones whether they're on the hand or on the spine on the leg or uh tail they all kind of do the same they they allow you to do free form deformations on your mesh and generally they appear between each bone in your meta rig in the limbs that is a little bit different they appear at the elbow and at the wrist but also there is one additional tweak bone between each of the main tweak bones so we have one main at the shoulder one at the elbow one at the wrist and then between them there is one and this can be actually set up in the metaric instead of having just one additional tweak bone between each of the main ones we can have two or three or as many as we want and again i explained that in a lot of details in the manual and these tweak bones you can either move rotate or scale and when you modify them very drastically then you get something that is not realistic but it is great for cartoony effects so very often you'll use these in cartoon animations but if you move them very subtly then they may be used in realistic animation as well for example if i very gently scale this bone and move it up a bit then this can simulate flexing of the muscle with that we are ready to start posing a character so for this example i'm going to go with a karate kick pose but you can do whatever you like i have already found and downloaded a reference image and first i'm going to go to object mode and then all i have to do is drag it from my browser window into my blender window and it will appear i cannot give you access to this image because i don't have the rights for it but if you just go to a search engine and look for karate kick you should be able to find suitable images with this image selected i want to go to the image properties and enable transparency now this guy is facing the other way so if i press ctrl m and then hold the middle mouse button and drag to the side then i can mirror this image and now i'm just going to scale it a little bit to to match my character there is a whole debate whether using reference images is good or not personally i think it's fine i'm going to duplicate this image to the side so i have it once over my character and and also a little bit to the side i'm also going to move this image a little bit in the x-axis and now i can go to my rig and switch to pose mode again i want to hide my tweak layers and then i have to decide whether i want my limbs to be ik or fk in this case i'm going to keep the arms to fk and i'm also going to enable the the limp follow option you have to do this for each arm individually and then i can hide the ik controls because i won't need them for the legs i want the supporting leg this leg here to be ik because it will stay on the ground and the other one i could keep it to ik but i'm going to switch it to fk and again i want the limb follow option on and now i want to hide the fk for the left leg and the ik for the the right leg okay uh the first thing i want to try to match in the reference is the position of the torso i can see that this guy is kind of bending backwards and also i'm going to switch to orientation to local also the whole torso is kind of bending to the side quite a bit okay now let's try to position the arms they're in fk so i can try i can start rotating them a nice trick that you can use when you pause your lumps in in perspective mode is instead of pressing r for rotation once you can double tap r and that will allow you to rotate your limb on many axes it is a little bit hard to describe and at first it may feel a little bit unintuitive but once you get used to it it's very useful but actually i'll show you an even nicer trick if you go in under and panel tools and enable auto ik then i can grab the the lower arm here and i can start moving it and that will move the arm is if it was in ik mode even though it is actually in fk mode this is a very cool blender feature i'm going to go to side view and try to match the reference so this arm is looking nice now now i'm actually unable to see my image so i'm going to go to object mode select this image and in the properties i want to set the depth to front and that will put the image in the front and then i can play with the opacity until it until i can see both my model and the reference and maybe if i switch to yeah maybe if i switch to a material preview mode then i can see it even better now i'm going to rotate the leg until it kind of matches the reference and then i also need to rotate it on its own axis so that's the y-axis okay if i remove the overlays i can see what i have betters because the reference image is getting in the way another way is to just hide the reference image for a second another thing that i see in the reference is that this leg is rotated quite a bit so i'm going to first rotate the foot and then let's switch to to the classic pole target and move it a little bit to the side as well okay uh inside view let's try to match the position of this arm as well i'm changing between using standard rotation and the auto ik feature i just use whichever you makes more sense in the in the current situation so this overlapping reference is getting difficult to work with at some point you have to stop relying on your overlapping references and just look at a reference that you have on the side or just go by by your feeling you can also use multiple references that's also very useful because they can show you different aspects of the pose that you want to recreate so i'm just going to delete this reference image and this one i'm also going to delete because i have two monitors and i i'm going to have the reference image on the second monitor if you don't you can there are many things that you can do you can just keep your reference here you can switch this window to the image edit editor and load the image okay another thing that i can see in my reference is that the upper body is not straight but it curves a little bit so i'm going to grab the chest control and rotate it and here you can actually see the advantage of having the limp follow option on if it was off i have to recreate this pose again but if it was off and then i tried to reposition my chest then this arm will move and then i'll have to adjust the position again if i try to reposition the uh chest again then i have to go back to the arm and position it again i'm going to undo here i have the limp follow option off i can rotate the chest but the arm will keep its general alignment and that will allow me to work faster and that is even more useful when you're actually animating this character because when you're animating you would have to set one keyframe for the chest and then one for the upper arm and one for the lower arm and so on but if you have this uh follow option on then you may be able to avoid setting those additional keyframes anyway let's keep adjusting the pose i'm going to select the hips and turn on off overlays and then i'm going to double tap r and try to see if rotating the hips would improve the pose in some way in this case i don't i'm not quite sure so i'm going to uh leave that for a second let's focus on the head the head should be a little bit up and the character should also be looking at in the direction in which he's kicking i can also try to move the neck a little bit here i think rotating the shoulder up a little bit is uh nice and i'll move the arm a little bit up this arm is supposed to guard your face if that was kickboxing rather than then karate then maybe this arm should be here as well to guard the face so yeah i'm going to go with that uh let's experiment and have fun with this i'm going to try to rotate the foot a little bit to match what i see in the reference let's turn off overlays by the way if you see me quickly toggle uh the overlays on and off that you can toggle from here that is because i have activated a special pi menu i'm not going to go into details about that just know that when it when i quickly toggle these um overlays it it's the same as clicking over here and so i wasn't very happy with this food being straight like this i think rotating it a little bit looks better i'm not also not quite sure about the hips area we can spend a lot of time trying to fine tune everything so that's that's not too bad um i also want to move the the tail in a position that i like and again i'm going to activate the follow option and that will give me a very nice starting position for the position for the pose of the tail and then i'm just going to rotate it a little bit and that looks nice so yeah then you can keep experimenting with this if you're a kid from the 90s like i was um you can try to do a van dam pose like this or maybe some sort of a flying kick i'm going to switch this leg as well to fk and unhide the fk controls here again the head follow and limp follow options help me preserve the the poses for the arms that i already established so that i don't have to do much additional work and i can end up with something like this so i definitely encourage you to try this for yourself find references of poses that you want to achieve they don't have to be kicks or punches they can be ballet poses ballet poses are definitely very nice and interesting to imitate or whatever you like actually it will be super cool if you post the poses that you achieved in in the comments uh just upload them to imager or email guru whatever it's called i'm going to google it now actually oh supposedly it's pronounced imager okay so yeah i hope to see your creations i did skip some of the uh additional options like this ik parent paul paul parent there are a few others that i did skip there are also other rig types which i didn't handle in this video but i think this should give you a very solid ground now you should know where to look for the additional options and then you can play with them and find out what they do and of course you can also check out my manual where i have a short video for each and every one of these options also for the options of the metric if you go to the meta rig there are some options that you can change before you generate your rig that will affect the final rig uh and yeah i cover all of that in the manual uh okay more videos are coming soon a lot of you want to know more about weight painting which i'm going to cover very soon i have a video about the the riggify facial rig i'm going to have a video about that as well so yeah subscribe stay subscribed and see you soon

Channel: CGDive

Views: 46,516

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Id: vKgH5zXIYmM

Length: 33min 51sec (2031 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 18 2020