Hello everyone. A while ago, I made a video demonstrating
how to draw a simple character using Krita and rigging
and animating it with Moho. I wanted to make it more accessible by
recreating this process using Blender. During this tutorial, I’ll demonstrate
how we can draw our cut-out characters, import them into Blender, and then finally
how to rig and animate them in a scene. Here you can see a side by side comparison between the previous animation achieved in
Moho and the new Blender version. I found using Blender this
way, simple and effective. If you are new to animation, but love drawing, this technique is a great
way to quickly get started. So for this video, we'll start
with a brand new character, which in this case is a bi-pedal
Tiger, wearing a dressing gown. Here I’m drawing our character in
Krita, which is free and open-source, but feel free to use whatever drawing
application you’re comfortable with. We’ll start off with a sketch, but
once we have the design finalised, we’ll draw each part of the
character on a separate layer. Make sure you name your layers as you draw them, this helps when importing them into Blender. For example, with our tiger, we have
Head, Body, Arm1 & 2, Tail and the Feet. Now that our character is
drawn, we can delete the sketch and it’s time to export our layers. If we’re using Krita, we can do this by
selecting Tools>Scripts>Export layers. We select the document that we want to export, choose where we want to put the image files, under the “initial directory” panel, and check
the “adjust export size to layer content” box. Then we select PNG, and finally press OK. Going to the folder where we saved the images, we’ll find each layer saved
as a separate PNG image. We’ll also want to save an
image of the entire character, as a reference for reconstructing it in Blender. Now we open up Blender, and if the
addon “Import images as planes” is not already enabled we’ll
need to go to Edit>Preferences, then under the Addons tab, we search
for “Import images as planes”. Then check the box and save the preferences. Now we can press “Shift+A”, Image, Reference, and then we’ll select the
image of our entire character. Once we turn down the opacity, we can
import each layer of our character, using the import images as planes addon
(Shift+A to add, Image, Images as Planes). It’s important to consider the import properties,
for example, under the material settings, the default “Principled” option will allow shadows
to fall on the image, and to be cast from it. The “Shadeless” option will make the image
completely removed from the scene’s lighting, and “Emit” will make the image seem
to be removed from the lighting, but any shiny 3D objects in the
scene will reflect the image. Other than that choice, we can leave these
settings as default. I chose “Principled”, but any of these will work. Now we just have to spend some time to scale, move and in some cases rotate each limb
to align it with our reference image. You can do this with G to Move,
R to Rotate and S to Scale. Make sure to move each image
closer and further away, based on their original layer order. Once we’ve done that, we can delete
the reference image, and start rigging. For this character, there are two
types of bones that we will use. The deformation bones, the ones that will
affect the vertices of the image planes, and then the control bones, these are
the ones that we will animate directly. For our character, the deformation
bones included a torso bone, a head bone, two arm bones for
each arm, one for each hand, one for each foot, four tail bones, and several bones for the lower
section of the dressing gown. Before we add the control bones, we’ll bind
the image planes to the deformation bones. We’ll accomplish this by first adding
several subdivisions to each mesh. We do this with the use of Loop cuts,
CTRL+R, to add more resolution to the mesh. To attach the images to the
bones we need to tell the mesh, which bones should control
which vertices of the mesh. We can do this by selecting an image mesh, add an armature modifier, under the modifiers tab. This will allow us to associate the bones to
the vertex groups that we are about to create. Remember to select the rig
under the “object” property. Under the Object data panel, this
is the one with the green triangle, we can add vertex groups by
pressing the plus button. These are groups of vertices
that will be controlled by a bone with the same name as the group. We’ll create one vertex group for each
bone that will affect the selected mesh. As we just mentioned, for this to work, it’s important to match the name of the
vertex group to the name of the bone. Then we just assign the corresponding
vertices to each vertex group. We can do this by entering edit mode, press TAB,
select the vertices that you wish to assign, click the vertex group that you want to
attach them to, and press the assign button. Now it’s time to add the control bones. These include a duplicate of the
head, the arm and hand bones, the feet as well as the lower
gown bones at the sides. We’ll also add shoulder
bones, to move the arm around, a bone at the top of the torso deformation bone,
to stretch and squash the character’s body. Make sure to name the control
bones with the prefix CTRL. Just a reminder that in edit mode,
we can duplicate bones by pressing SHIFT-D, and add bones with SHIFT-A. For organisation’s sake, we can move the
control bones onto a new armature layer, by selecting the bones, pressing M, then
selecting the second square in the popup menu. To switch between these layers, we can
find them under the object data panel of the armature (This is the green stick figure). Now we’ll add all the bone
constraints that we require. Bone constraints, found under the bone constraints
tab, are like the modifiers, but for bones. They allow us to make bones
behave in a certain way, automatically, based on other bones and objects. Most importantly, in order to make our control
bones actually affect the deformation bones, we add a copy transforms constraint
to each of the deformation bones. This means that when you move,
rotate or scale the control bone, the deformation bone will copy this action. There are three exceptions to
this, the deformation torso bone, and the two middle Lower gown bones, as
these don’t have direct control bones. Instead, we add a stretch to constraint to
the torso bone, targeting the stretch control. This means that as the control bone moves, the torso deformation bone will stretch from its
origin to the base of the stretch control bone. For each of the lower gown bones, we add two copy
rotation constraints, each with a strength of 0.5, one targets the left deformation lower
gown bone, and the other the right. This means that when the left and
right lower gown bones rotate, the middle ones add some extra detail
to the form of the dressing gown, without having to animate it manually. We add a copy location constraint
to the upper arm CTRL bones, that target their respective shoulder bones. This is so that they will move with
the shoulder, but not rotate with them, instead rotating with their
parent, the torso stretch bone. We also add a copy rotation
constraint to each of the tail bones, referencing the previous tailbone. This means we can rotate the base of
the tail and the whole tail curves. Here I’m adding some custom shapes to the bones, just to make them more usable. There’s a link in the description
for how to do this yourself. Now the basic rig is finished, but
we can still add some more features. For example, although we’re using images, this doesn't stop us from being
able to create a simple head turn. To do this we add a shape key on the head mesh. Shape keys are different sets
of positions of vertices, that can be interpolated between
with the use of a slider. To do this, we select the face mesh, then
under the object data tab (the green triangle), you’ll see the shape keys panel
beneath the vertex groups. But this time when we press the
plus button, a basis key is created. This is the default position of the mesh. If we press plus again, it will
create our first shape key. With this selected, we can enter edit
mode, change the arrangement of vertices, then in object-mode, we can morph
between the default position and the new shape key by moving the
slider, under the shape key panel. For our head turn, we’ll create two
shape keys, three including the basis, and we’ll form the look left
pose, and the look right pose. We could animate these sliders manually, but for ease of use, we can attach
them to some new control bones. These bones will include the main
control, which will move left and right, as well as a base control, which will be used
to limit the distance of the main control, while also being used to move
the control around the screen. We can apply a limit distance constraint
on the main control that targets the base. This means that we are unable to move this bone
more than a specified distance from the base. I chose 0.3 metres. Also under the N-panel, I locked
the z and y location of the bone, so it can only move left and right. To make the bone affect the
slider, we can right-click on the shape key slider and select “add driver”. Drivers allow us to automatically set one
property based on the values of other properties. In the menu that pops up, look
down to the variable panel, we select the armature object
and the relevant control bone, then we’ll select the local x location
of the bone to affect the slider. Moving up to the expression panel,
the current equation is var + 0, this means to move the slider to a value of 1, the bone’s local x position must be 1 as well, but because our control can
move only a maximum of 0.3 m, we need to change the equation to var/0.3, or for the slider that needs the bone to move
in the negative direction, set it to -var/0.3 We then do the same for the
body turn, and we’re done. We’re ready to animate. I planned an animation of our
character jumping over rocks, and generally displaying
different forms of athletics, and I wanted to draw the
scene using grease pencil, however, I had some issues with
layer ordering and antialiasing where the image planes and
grease pencil objects overlapped, so as a workaround, I decided to export
each grease pencil object as a png, then re-import them using the
import images as planes addon. I’ll let you enjoy the time-lapse
of the animation of our character. I decided to create the grass with a 3D
mesh, which combined with the images well. Thanks for watching everyone,
hopefully, this was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to
ask and I’ll do my best to answer them, or if you just want to share what
you’ve created, you can email me, or better yet, leave a link down in the comments. Thanks again and I’ll see you later.
