[Blender 2.8/2.9] Rigify Tutorial 7-1: Rigify Bone Groups and Layers (Overview)

in this chapter i'm going to talk about making your riggify rigs more user-friendly as with everything that rigify does it doesn't really bring new functionality to blender it just uses the existing functionality and automates a lot of the tedious processes to make things easier for us so what we are going to talk about here is going to be organizing your bones on different layers which you can hide and unhide and also bone groups which allow you to color code your bones and custom shapes so that they're easily recognizable before we go and explore what riggify does let's just show the default blender behavior i'm going to press shift a armature create a single bone and let's go to edit mode select the bone and shift d duplicate it maybe two times and maybe extrude some bones so now let's go to pose mode at the top of the armature tab you should have at the top you should have skeleton and then bone groups make sure you're looking at these make sure you're not looking at the riggify bone groups or rigify layer names we're going to look at them in a second under skeleton you have these squares these are the blenders armature layers unfortunately this is just ancient technology from the 90s with blender 2.8 blender got a really nice overhaul of the outliner which allows us to organize our objects really well but bone layers are just in in their old state so hopefully they'll also get an overfill soon but this is what we get right now so if i select let's say this bone and press m i can move it to another layer so i'm going to just click on the second layer and then i'm going to select all of these bones and click m and put them on the third layer and they disappear because currently these layers are hidden so if i just click on another layer it will become visible and then if i shift click i can visualize multiple layers at a time so the this is the main behavior of blender layers and now let's look at the bone groups let's click this plus sign three times and it will create three groups we can rename them if we really wanted let's say this one is yellow this one is red and this one is blue let's click on the yellow one and from this color menu select the yellow color for the red let's select red and blue let's select blue and now nothing has happened yet i have to select some bones so i have these selected and click assign and since i currently have the blue group highlighted my bone turned blue let's select this bone the middle one and choose the red bone group and click assign and this first bone that we created will will assign the yellow group to it and as you can see my bones got really colorful which can be very helpful when you have a very complex complex rig let's go to object mode and press shift a mesh circle so i'm going to make this circle into a custom shape for one one of my bones let's go to pose mode select this this bone and go to to the bone tab and on the viewport display there's this custom object and choose the circle as you can see the circle kept the yellow color so let's try this again let's choose the red bone and give it again the circle as a custom shape and this time the circle is red and here the circle would become blue so yeah custom shapes preserve the group color that's what i wanted to point out so let's see uh how this works in rigify the pre-built meta rigs have these things set up by default so let's uh create a basic human and without further ado go to the the armature tab and just generate it and now if i go to to the end panel item with the generated trick selected let's uh hit slash to isolate the generated rig i'm going to go to pause mode and right away you can see that all of the bones here are color-coded some are red some are you know green and they're these blue twig bones the spine bones are yellow and another thing that's really important is this rig layers menu let's try to click one of the buttons let's say the torso one and as you can see some parts of my rig just disappeared let's click that again and they'll appear again and i'm going to click again and pay attention to to the layers over here when i click torso this layer also gets deselected so if i click it again it gets selected again also if i shift click this layer then torso is deactivated so these buttons in these layers are linked this menu is created by rigify and it's just a workflow improvement so that we don't have to work with this ancient technology it's much easier to to hide and unhide our layers without having to guess or you know memorize where each part of the rig is so yeah that's what you get with rigify but how is it done let's select the meta rig press slash to go to local view and let's see how things are set up here in the rigidify bone groups and rigify layer names under wikify bone groups i see that i have these six colors already set up each of them has a number one two three four five six next to the number there is also a name which i can change these colors these bone groups are not directly applied here on the meta rig they're just data that rigify uses when you click the generate button and then it applies these colors to the final rig the way it applies applies those colors is defined over here in the rigidify layer names so this field here rigidify layer names does two things first it creates that menu that i showed you earlier the menu that allows you to easily hide and unhide layers without using blender's squares and dots and the other thing is it does is defines a bone group for each layer so let's look at what what's happening here this row with the monitor icon simply shows if this layer is currently hidden or not so if i for example shift click this layer you see that this monitor got deactivated as well and if i click it here then it it gets highlighted here as well the next field is where you set up the text for your button this is the text that your button will contain in the next field you let rigify know how you want to organize your menu and we are going to practice this in a second it's it will be easier than trying to explain it in words and here in this field you set up a number the number corresponds to this number here and this let's rig if i know know which bone group which color you want to use for this layer and it's also very nice you can kind of you can tweak these these numbers and you'll notice that the text next to it changes so you don't need to remember those numbers you can just tweak them and this text will let you know which bone group you're applying and i i did skip this part of of the interface this dot here that you can click and i generally don't use this feature and as far as i understand if i go to preferences add-ons and look for selection sets there is an add-on that is shipped with blender that you can activate i'm not going to activate it because i don't use it and this button creates functionality that works with that add-on since i don't use that add-on i'm not going to touch this menu either so that is it so next we are going to practice with really simple riggify rig and see what how we can create our custom menu

Channel: CGDive

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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: 5FK4jDCAOkk

Length: 8min 39sec (519 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020