Blender 2.9 - Character Rigging Tutorial - How to Rig a Character

hey hey welcome back guys this is kielen and welcome to my new and improved character rigging workflow 2021. we've only gone and just hit 20 000 subscribers so i thought with all these new subscribers it was about time i go back and revisit some old videos that could probably be done a little bit better so if you're ready to jump in with me today as always grab yourself a coffee start a blender and let's jump on into the video all right here we are guys we're back in blender and i hope you've all been keeping well it has been a short while but the first thing that we are gonna need to do today is of course to to get a character to rig and i'm gonna be using this nice low poly character today and if you'd like to go ahead and download this character i've left a link in the description where you can just go ahead and open this up and follow along with me today but of course feel free to go ahead and use your own personal characters too but if you're ready set up and good to go the first thing we need to do is to enable rigify this is just an add-on built into blender that's really gonna streamline our rigging process so all we need to do is go to edit go into preferences into add-ons and then search for rig and enable refi all right but now you've got that all enabled the first thing we need to do is to insert a meta rig to do that we can just go to add and if we go down into armature i'm going to be using this human metal rig today but just a quick note if this is your first time guys that doing this what i'd probably recommend to you is jumping on over into the basic tab and trying the basic humid metal rig it's pretty much the same thing as the human meta rig minus a couple of bones to reduce that complexity but today i'm going to be using the human meta rig because we've got the nice hands and we'll be removing some of those face bones so now we've got this in here what i want to do first is clicking on the armature i want to just be able to see this through the mesh and what we can do is come down into our data properties and we've got viewport display and in here let's just turn on in front and that's just going to make sure that we can see this armature through the character mesh at all times now it's just a case of lining this up with our character so what i'm going to do is just select my character pressing s to scale this down and what i try to do is to line up the shoulders primarily because i'm not too concerned about the face lining up because i will be removing some of the face bones and just readjusting the head bone so something like that looks pretty good to me and now i also want to go in and remove some of the bones that we're not going to be making use of today so to do that let's tab into edit mode on this here and we want to enable x-axis mirroring that's just going to make sure that anytime we do something on one side it's going to automatically happen on the other side and you know what that means half as much work which is always a good thing so with that enabled let's select some bones i want to delete and initially i'm going to get rid of this this is the breastbone so i'm going to select this pressing x and go to delete bones and it's automatically going to do the other side for us and i also want to remove these facial bones because it's far too complex for the type of character that i'm looking to make here so i'm just going to go and look at this from the right side and i'm going to use the box select tool if yours is known by default to do this just click and hold on your selection tool here and i'm using the select box tool but i'm just going to highlight all of these then press x delete bones back into front view and let's delete the ear too and that looks pretty good but just a quick note there is one sneaky little hidden bone here there's actually a face spawn inside this and in order to see that we can turn on x-ray up here and see this little one we need to delete this too otherwise he's to cause he's going to cause you a whole bunch of trouble and lay it on the line so let's click once click twice and then press x delete both and just like that we've got this nice basic armature with a nice set of fingers that we can go and line up on our character mesh ready to do some rigging so when it comes to aligning the metal rig to the character i tend to start from the bottom down here so what i like to do is to highlight the lower leg then just pressing g to move this into relative place so we're gonna just adjust everything from the front view first and then i like to select these two little orbeez type of sections i'm not quite sure what they're called should we just call them bone ends i think that'll do uh but then pressing g to move these into place and then i want to do the same for the hands so i'm just going to highlight all of the hand r to rotate this to make it horizontal g to move this up into relative place don't be too concerned with accurate placement of this right now because we will be going in and probably adjusting that hand but then let's also bring the elbow up so it's nice and straight and you want to try to make sure that this is nice and straight with the arm and now the head i think i'm just going to extend this up just to make sure that neck has a decent amount of room here and even though it looks pretty good from the front let's not forget that we do need to go into side view and do some aligning here also so generally this should be in line with the toes up here and this should be aligned with the ball of the foot round about there this bone down here should be aligned with the point where the foot meets the ground and generally it should be as wide as the foot so something like that i think we'll do for now but staying in right side view let's look at the leg i think that's pretty good and a quick tip here you also want to make sure that this leg does have an ever so slight bend just so rigify knows which way that leg is supposed to bend but i think that's not too bad as it is carry it on up let's take a look at the head here and that's not too bad i might just straighten out this bone slightly something like that and i think that's good for the main part i think what we need to do now is to align the arms so into top view highlighting all of the hand g to bring this over a bit more and then i'm going to press g and y to lock this to the y axis just to bring that arm forward and perhaps also bringing the shoulder forward slightly i'm just going to select these two orbs guy bring those forward something like that that looks pretty good for the alignment and now it's time to align these finger bones which can seem like quite a daunting task at first but trust me it's gonna be quite you know relatively quick when you can see the sort of way that i like to do this and would you look at that with four minutes in already and i need a sip of my coffee ah that's good stuff you know okay so where was i so what we need to do now is to align the fingers to our character mesh and what i like to do with this is to essentially reset the location and the you know the sort of rotation of the fingers so that they're nice and straight and then i can just nicely go ahead and realign them on my character here so to start what i like to do is to while in front view mode i'm just going to highlight all of the fingers and then deselect in the thumb by holding shift and just select the nose so we've only got the fingers on the wrist here and then we can press s z 0 and enter and that's going to flatten everything out and then we can press gz to bring these down so that just round about the center of our character mesh and now let's go into top view and we need to do a similar thing on this side but we'll start one finger at a time i'm going to hold shift and select all of the pinky finger bones then we can press s y 0 and that's and so now this bone is now nice and straight from this view and top view and pretty much good to be used as a finger bone so with this selected then let's start lining this up let's press r to rotate g to move this into place something like that and i think that looks pretty good and if you want to move the knuckle bones as well just highlight these press g to move these in just to get a bit more of an even spread on the fingers and not forgetting that if you aren't using the hand bones and you went for the more simple meta rig feel free to skip ahead into this tutorial and now i'm going to go ahead and do the rest of these fingers in the same way so holding shift to select all of these and then press s y 0 are to rotate and just bring those nicely in line and then readjust in those knuckle positionings by highlighting them like this just so those fingers have a nice even spread and make sure you are using the box select tool for this because if you select one of these on their own and press g to move you'll separate them like this so you do want to make sure that you are box selecting these but now let's finish this up so s y zero and this one two r to rotate whoop g to move r to rotate and then adjusting the spread on the knuckles something like that and then one more finger s y zero r to rotate and something like that and then just adjust in the knuckles one more time till we get a nicely aligned finger bones and of course not forgetting about this little thumb that we have sticking out down here what i like to do with this is just to hold shift and select all of the thumb bones i'm going to press s to scale this down initially then jumping into top view let's press r to rotate and g to move this in alignment with our thumb something like that i'm looking at the verticality here we also need to press g and z to bring this up just to make sure this sits nicely within our character mesh but i think that looks pretty good for the finger alignment what we need to do now is to give our fingers a little bit of a curvature just so rigify knows which way these things are supposed to bend so what we're going to do making sure that you're back in edit mode and i like to do this one knuckle at a time or rather four knuckles at a time so if we jump into top view first just like we did with the other knuckles what i'm going to do is holding shift i'm going to select all four of these first knuckles in the rows of the knuckles and then press in gz to bring this up i'm looking at it from the front view here i'm just going to give this a little bit of a lift and then back into top view selecting the next knuckles in the sequence back in the front view gz to bring this up just to begin creating like a nice arch and then the last knuckles in the alignment back in the front view g z to bring these up and just like that we're done we've given these fingers an ever so slight curvature so riggify should now know which way these fingers are supposed to bend and i think just like that coming back into front view here i think we've already aligned everything up very nicely and because we have that x-axis mirroring on you can see that this hand over here is already done for us the next thing to do is to just go ahead and generate a character rig but before we go ahead and generate a rig just make sure that you click on your meta rig here then pressing ctrl a and apply a scale that's just going to make sure that we reset those scale variables on the back end you don't really need to know what that means just make sure you apply scale to this meta rig before we then go ahead and click on our mat rig in our data properties here scroll down and find this rigify buttons option and we're just gonna go ahead and click generate rig but you may want to save first because you never know things could go south during the generating rig process but i'm sure you'll be fine so click generate rig and boom just like that we've got this nice pretty snazzy looking if i do say so myself meta not meta rig this is the actual rig that we're going to be using to pose and move our character and at this point we can actually click on a meta rig click on this eyeball to hide it because we no longer need it oh and would you look at the time i think it's time for a quick break let's pop to the kitchen make a coffee and come straight back all right and we're back to the video i hope you've all had a little break there with me if not then you're an absolute trooper fair play to you for sticking it out to the end without a break you know but what we're gonna do now uh so now we've got this nice character rig the essentially the way to use this is anything you want this rig to control you quite simply parent uh that part or that object to the rig so in this case i just want this rig to control this entire character so all i need to do is to highlight all of my character and then i want to shift click on my rig and shift click on it once again and that's just going to make sure that the rig is the last thing that we have selected and then we can just do control p object armature deform with automatic weights and it is literally that simple guys now you might not realize it but our character is now nicely rigged and if i click on our rig here in the drop down you get this new pose mode option if you click on pause mode we have all these different bones and controls and you can see all of mine here because i have x-ray enabled so enable x-ray just so you can see all through this thing and you spoil it for choice you've got so many different tools in here but sometimes too many tools can be a bad thing so what i like to do is to disable a bunch of these that we're probably not going to be using right now so what i like to do is to press n to open up the end menu and if we go into item and what we have now we have all our properties here but i'm going to close rig main properties and we're looking at the rig layers option here now the rig layers option just corresponds with all these different types of controls that we have access to what i tend to do is to disable all the tweaks the finger detail get rid of those tweaks and also disable the forward kinematics that's these fk bones or controls until we're left with just these inverse kinematics for the limbs and then we've also got the torso bones for the you know the sore torso over here and the head and that way all we need to do now is to click on any part of the body we'd like to control and start moving things around so in this case say i want to move this foot let's click on this foot control press g to move and we can nicely see that this character's leg is nicely rigged and you can even double tap r here to rotate this freely and our character is nice and limb you know they could they could probably do a nice bit of yoga and have a good stretch oh that's the good stuff just to them has anybody ever watched don't mess with the zohan when he goes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah ignore my rambling sometimes i get carried away oh and i did a little thing there so if you ever want to reset the positions rotations or scale of any of these bones just select it or select all of it and you can press alt g to reset the location alt r to reset the rotation and alt s to reset the scale and what else do i want to cover here yes so in terms of moving it around you can just click and move things around but the fingers are slightly different so the fingers here you have these little finger controls and what you need to do is to select one of these and you can press s to scale and now you can see we get this nice bend in finger motion just like that and that looks like it has done a great job at rigging and if you want to do all of these at once what i tend to do is to change my pivot point to individual origins and then holding shift to select all of my fingers we can just press s to do these all at once or individually but just like that guys your character is nicely rigged and you can go ahead and do some awesome poses and playing around and don't forget if you make anything cool that you'd like me to check out don't forget to tag me in it on instagram at keelan john underscore but before we leave here today i want to touch on one more quick bit of cleanup to do on this character rig so you might have noticed that when i move my arm my hair moves now in this case we don't want the shoulder or the arm to control the hair do we so what's happening here is that there is some influence from the shoulder that's occurring on the hair so we need to remove that and in order then to go in and adjust the weights on these different parts of the mesh we can just go back into object mode click on our hair here because we want to adjust the weight on the hair and in the drop down we have this conveniently named weight paint mode and now what this here now this piece of mesh will now have a bunch of new vertex groups inside the data properties here and under vertex groups we have all these different groups that correspond with different parts of the rig in this case i know because i've done this before that typically the upper arm part of the controls here will influence anything that's a little bit too close during the automatic waiting process so what we need to do is look through our vertex groups and in this case we're looking for upper arm dot r which the dot r just corresponds to the right side so let's have a little scroll through and here we have upper arm so if i click on upper arm okay so there's nothing there but if i click on the next one there we go let me zoom in here so you can see this now weight generally goes from zero being this dark blue cold color and red being hot and maximum influence now we can see there's a slight little bit of light blue which tells me there's a little bit of weight here that shouldn't be here what we're going to do is get rid of this now so to do that we can quite simply in our weight painting here i'm going to select my gradient tool i'm going to turn my weight to zero keep the strength on one and let's just click and drag across the hair to remove that influence and just give it a couple of old drags just to make sure there's nothing there but just like that we've corrected that weight issue and therefore now if i go back into object mode back into pause mode on my rig and move my arm it no longer has an influence on the hay and we've diagnosed a little bit of a weight issue and if you encountered that throughout any of the processes don't forget just to pop in and manually adjust those weights and you should be good and just like that guys we come to the end of another tutorial but before you go i just wanted to jump in and give a big thank you for hitting that subscribe button i can't believe that we're over 20 000 subscribers now which absolutely blows my mind there's over twenty thousand of you that like to listen to me talk absolute nonsense while trying to make a tutorial but if you did enjoy likes and subs are very much appreciate as always and if you'd be interested in the source files for these tutorials feel free to head on over to my patreon where you can download those but other than that my name has been keyland enjoy the rest of your day and i'll catch you in the next one [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Keelan Jon

Views: 32,607

Keywords: Blender3D, Blendertutorial, Design, Development, 3dArtist, 3dart

Id: 1yHF1PcreIY

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021