Blender 4.0 NEW Rigging and Animation Features

here I am in the brand new blender 4 and let me check my [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] amateur oh my God in blender four we now have bone collections instead of the old system of layer boxes and that is just one of the many cool new features that we are getting with this major release so let's take a closer look at the changes related to rigging and animation in blender 4 you can now get access to all CG dive tutorials including my extensive paid courses un relased videos and supporter only content for just $599 a month check out academy. CG di.com SLS subscription first up bone Collections and Bone colors so now I am in blender 3.6 and until this version the main way to organize our armatures was to go to ARA Tab and use these boxes as layers so in edit mode or in pose mode I can select any bone and press M and move it to a layer I can also select multiple bones press M and shift click multiple layers to assign a bone to all of them I then have to click or shift click on these boxes to unhide or hide layers we also had protected layers which which was related to the old proxy system which was already deprecated around blender 3 so this whole thing here was mostly for legacy purposes and all of this including the post position and rest position buttons was in this skeleton panel and another tool for organizing bones was bone groups which allowed us to organize bones independent of the layer they are on even though this was called bone groups it it was mostly using for applying a color to a bone which was a little bit confusing also these bone colors were only visible in pose mode and in edit mode bones were only shown in a default color scheme another way to organize bones was a pre-installed atom if you go to addons and search for bone selection sets and activate it you'll have these selection sets and that will will give you another tool to organize your bones again you can create different selection sets independent of layers or bone groups now just pressing select we'll select these bones that I assigned to this selection set now let's move to blender 4 and see what changed if we go to the amate T in blender 4 right away you'll notice the new bone collections but also we have this new pose panel which contains the poe position and rest position buttons so it was separated from the bone layers which makes sense now let's look at the bone collections first of all we are no longer limited to 32 layers you can just press the plus button and add as many as you like and you can delete them with the minus button to assign a bone to a collection you have to be in edit mode or pause mode select any bones that you want to move press m and select the collection that you want to move them to you can also press M and create a new collection this way and you can give it a name right away if you want to assign a bone to multiple collections you can press shift and M and select the collection that you want to edit to if I press shift and M again the collections the bone is already assigned to have a minus sign to them so if I press on that collection the bone will be removed removed from that collection another way is to have your bone selected highlight the collection that you want to add the bone to and press aign or remove will remove it from that collection the select button will select all bones that belong to the highlighted collection next to each collection we have an i icon which will hide and unhide all bones assigned to it you can use these arrows to reorganize your list of collections this feels a little bit outdated I hope we'll get drag and drop later on under this submenu we have solo visability which will hide all collections aside from the highlighted one and also an operator to show all collections we now have the ability to add custom properties to a bone collection so if I add a new property here it will only belong to this Bones collection if I highlight any of the other collections it won't be there it's a attached to this collection and I think that is all you need to know about bone collections they are very straightforward and much more intuitive than the previous implementation currently we only have simple collections but in the future we'll most likely get sub collections or nested collections just like in the outliner if I create a new collection I can Nest it under another collection so you can expect that we'll get something similar for bone collections another change is that bone groups has completely disappeared as you saw until blender 3.6 bone groups were a weird mix of grouping and also coloring your bones but since we now have unlimited bone collections grouping a set of Bones can now be done here in bone collections here I have my bone set and as for bone colors they are now a bone property so if I select a bone and go to the Bone tab under viewport display we have bone color and pose bone color so if I select a custom color such as red the bone will become red and what is new is that this color will also be visible in edit mode you'll see that in edit mode this menu changes and you can only change the bone color so let's go back to pose mode or object mode where we'll have all of the options in here I can also set pose bone color let's set it to Blue so in pose mode my bone will have one color blue and in edit mode it will have another color so if you want to get the old plender Behavior you should set bone color to default colors and only set the pose bone color I'm so used to the bones being in their default color in edit mode that I think it will take me a while until I start using this bone color feature let's make sure we are not missing anything in pose mode you have buttons which allow you to copy these custom colors from the active bone to selected bones so if I select a couple of Bones and shift select this bone to make it active I can press this button and that will color the selected bones with the exact same colors and that's important because it will allow you to select these bones as a set so let's give this bone um red color and then copy it to another bone so now if I press shift G this will bring up the select grouped menu and that allows me to select by collection so that will select all Bones on the highlighted collection or I can press shift G and choose color and that will select all bones with the exact same color and it has to be the exact same color set because we can also choose completely custom color sets so if I make this one red and the second color which is the selected outline I'll make bluish and then the last one which is the active highlight I'll make light blue right now if I copy this color to the other bone select this bone press shift G and choose color that will select this other bone which is colored with the exact same way but if I go to this bone and change the Hue just slightly then shift G will no longer select it so I guess the old bone groups did have an advantage because once a set of Bones is grouped you can just change the color and all bones will be updated instantly so maybe bringing this functionality back in Future versions of blender may be a good idea I'm going on a little bit of a tangent but these predifined colors while they're great a little bit of a problem with them is that the selected highlight color and the active highlight color are just shade of the main color which may make make it difficult to see what is selected what is active and so on so one solution is to use the custom color sets but you can also go to edit preferences themes bone color sets and set your selected an active colors and I have the hex code for the default selected bone color so I can just set it in here and then just copy and paste it to the other color sets and I also have the hex code for active bone so set it and copy and paste it now I'll save my settings and now I can quickly set a color and have consistent selected and active outlines and earlier I mentioned the bone selection set addon and it's still here in blender 4 so you can still use it it's here in the Arab however now its functionality overlaps with the bone collections you could simply use bone collections instead of selection sets notice how the interface for bone Collections and selection sets is very very similar but if you need another level of organization you can still use selection sets and let's cover something related to Bone colors if I select one of my colored bones and press I and insert the key frame and then switch to the dope sheet you will see a little colored box next to the Bone name and Bone properties in earlier versions of blender this used to look like this which many people found difficult to read and this is controlled by a blender preference if we go to animation we have Channel group colors and because many people didn't like this this used to be off by default but now that we have a better cleaner solution it will be on by default when you install blender 4 next let's cover weight painting there are changes in blend 4 which are great but they involve changes of the key map which may be confusing at first so as you should know if you select your arure and shift select the mesh that is bound to it and go to Weight paint mode in all the versions of blender you could control click on a bone and select it but now that doesn't work and also if I control click in this painted area I will start removing weights so I'll undo so what happened is that the key map changed now to select a bone you need to alt and click and you can also alt shift and click if you want to select multiple bones which can be useful in weight paint mode when you use some of the weights operators for example okay so that is how you select bones and I have the draw brush active in a brush set to mix with weight and strength to one so now if I click I'll just add weights which is what you expect by the way I should enable my auto normalize in symmetry uh nothing has changed here you can watch my old tutorials on weight painting they still apply but now if I want to remove weights I can just control click here control and click remove weights and if I shift and click I blur weights you'll notice that when I shift click I temporarily switch to the blur brush automatically so again alt and click to select a bone and activate its vertex group alt shift and click to select multiple bones click to add weights control click to subtract weights shift click to blur these changes will break your muscle memory a little bit but long term this is great this is exactly how painting should behave so if I set my strength to a lower value I'll be able to paint lower values and also if I control click that will also subtract lower values if you want to set the strength of the blur brush you need to switch to the blur brush and change the strength but keeping strength to one generally works for me you can also switch to the Ed brush that will behave more or less the same and if you use the subtract brush you'll have the inverted Behavior so by just clicking you will remove weights and if you control and click you will add weights but personally I would just keep it to uh either mix or add oh and by the way control shift and click also select bones in this mode uh just like old click so I'm not sure why we have two shortcuts that do the same it could be because of the emulate 3 buttons setting which some people use and it creates some inconsistencies but these are the changes when weight painting and I haven't seen this explained properly not even in the official update notes so I hope this helps I also noticed some new operators in the weights menu so let's take a quick look set weights already existed in previous versions but the shortcut has changed it used to be shift K now it is control X so if I click here or if I undo and press crl X in the viewport this will set a weight of one for the entire active group and the weight is set to one because the weight of my paintbrush is set to one if I set it to this value for example and press contr X the mesh will become green because this color corresponds to this weight next we have sample weight and so if I click it I'll get this temporary tool and I can point to any part of my Mish and the weight value will change and it will be the exact weight value that was under my cursor the same thing can be done with this sample weight tool however now I need to switch back to the pain pressure tool and if you want to use the shortcut which is shift X I expected that I would have to press shift X and then click to sample but that is not the case just place your mouse over the area you want to sample and press shift X and that will sample the weight under the mouse right here I have full influence so shift X and I'll have weight of one next we have sample group and when I activate this tool I can click on a bone and honestly I'm not sure what happens uh I'm not sure what this does um but if you do this is how you sample a group The Tool tip says that this will select one of the vertex groups available under the current Mouse position and there you have it next we have gradient linear and this will allow you to apply a gradient so this is the same as using this gradient here and also I can go to weights gradient radial and create a radial gradient without changing my tool so as you can see a lot of these changes and updates in weight paint mode are meant to reduce the need of switching between different tools you can just have the draw brush active and paint weights remove weights smooth weights sample weights set the weight for the entire group and even create gradients so the shortcuts are shift a for linear and shift alt a for radial so shift a and just drag for a gradient and shift alt and a and drag for a radial gradient and I really like these changes these are exactly the workflow improvements that I'm hoping for and some more changes in the key map in weight paint mode we have these selection modes for vertices or faces and if you like to use shortcuts the shortcut for vertex selection used to be V and for face selection I honestly don't remember but now in blender 4 the shortcuts are one for face sele selection and two for vertices and that is very similar to edit mode in edit mode one is vertex selection two edges and three is faces how we select the elements has also changed to select elements I can alt and click on them and then alt and shift will add to the selection or remove from the selection and it is the same in vertex selection mode alt to select alt shift to add and remove vertices the pose Library also received an update if I go to pose mode for this character I have this Shelf with poses by default it's going to be contracted you won't see it to expand it go to this little triangle here and click on it you can also make the Shelf taller if you have a lot of facets you can change the size of the thumbnails and in previous versions the POS library was here in the end panel under animation po Library so now in blender 4 we just have this info telling us that the PO library was moved uh and we have a button to toggle the Shelf in future versions the PO Library will probably disappear here from the end panel um I think this is only here for existing users to make that transition to the new shelf a little bit easier by the way I just watched my own tutorial on the pose Library just to make sure that everything still works and it does this shelf here is the only significant change so if you need detailed info about creating storing and using poses check out my previous video in the nla we have a nice little quality of life Improvement it used to be kind of difficult to reorganize the strips one of the blender developers made a funny joke about the strips being stuck in a maze but now you can just select the strip and press G or you can also click and drag and you can place the strip anywhere you want and you can see how when it starts overlapping another strip it will change color and if you release now blender will just place it at the closest possible position also it used to be impossible to move a strip through a locked track but now it is possible no problem at all it's just that if I try to place this strip on the locked truck it won't work this behavior is very nice and predictable so big thanks to the developers that designed and implemented it and another slight but important change in the nla as you probably know if I select a strip and press tab I can edit it but there are two modes for editing a strip if you go to edit you can start tweaking a strip action full stack or lower stack and now the shortcut tab is assigned to full stack until now it was assigned to lower stack lower stack means that when when I start editing this action I will only see how it is affected by the tracks below it full stack means that I'll also be able to see the influence of the trucks above the action that I'm editing and of course you would usually want to see the full stack but until blender 4 there was a technical issue which made using full stack a little bit unreliable so on the surface it's a keymap change but what may be more important is that the underlying issue has been fixed and something else that is good to keep in mind is that the shortcuts for duplicating an nla strip has been flipped from the edit menu you can see that we can duplicate or duplicate linked duplicate means that we'll get a new strip containing a whole new copy of the original action duplicate linked will also copy the strip but the strip will now contain a duplicate link to the original action so no new action will be created these shortcuts used to be the other way around um but let's see how this works if I press shift d and duplicate this strip and try to edit it you will see that it's called injured and a couple of the other strips turned red that is to indicate that they are using the same link action now if I press alt D and then edit this action with tab you'll see that my action is called injured 01 so it is a completely new action and none of these strips is red because none of the strips scrips contains the same action so I'm not sure how I feel about this change because it is not consistent with other parts of blender for example in the 3D view Port shift d duplicates and all D creates a linked duplicate but either way that is what we have so keep it in mind in the graph editor you may see huge performance improvements when working with dense graphs with a lot of Curves a lot of key frames and a lot of transform channels also there is a new smoothing algorithm called Butterworth and I would be lying if I told you that I knew exactly how it works and what its uses are but it does seem very useful for working with dense curves such as mup data so I'll definitely be exploring this and once it makes sense to me I may make a tutorial about it and related to that we have a bunch of new blend modes again I'm not an expert on these I just started playing around with them my self another nice update in the graph editor we can now update multiple curve modifiers at the same time so if I add a noise modifier to this curve and the same noise modifier on another curve then I can shift select both curves or maybe box select them and make one of them active now both of them have the noise modifier so for example I can alt and click on the scale factor and both curves or rather both modifiers will be affected and that will work for as many curves that you have the noise modifier on this is based on the modifier name so if I rename this one to noise one now one is called noise the other one is noise one so now all clicking will not work so they have to have the same name and then you'll be able to modify their overlapping values at the same time now for some additional changes we're going to take a look at the release notes by the way this is the most complete document where you can see almost all important changes in a new blender version and I'm going to share a link but now if you go to animation in rigging I already covered most of these updates po Library bone Collections and colors then we have a change in beny Bones which will make them behave differently presumably better when weights are applied um and I'm not ready to cover this but in blender if you want to know how to enable this new feature you have to select your bone which should be a bendy bone meaning that it should have bendy bone segments and you'll see this new vertex mapping setting which is set to straight which means the same behavior as in previous versions and if you want to use the new and improved version you can switch it to curved and that should give you better bbone deformations but it may be slower to compute then we have an update to The Preserve volume algorithm of the amateure modifier here you can see see the before and after if you use preserve volume and you bend and also scale some bones you'll get something weird like this whereas the improved algorithm in blender 4 will give you proper deformations what I love about this update is that supposedly this whole problem was caused by something called crazy space nice so just for reference preserve volume is part of the IM modifier it's a checkbox and if you enable it it will slightly change how weighting is applied to your mesh I generally keep it off because it has some drawbacks and also it cannot be exported to game engines and such but if you do use it you'll have a nice experience with it in blender 4 this next segment is a bit of a mixed bag on the one hand blender now has save incremental so if you go to file you'll find save incremental so if I save my file and give it a name and then I go to file save incremental a number will be added to my file name and every time you click save incremental the number will be updated this is awesome this is a feature that every software needs however the shortcut for this new feature is control alt s which used to be assigned to other features namely for bones if I switch my viewport display to bbone I used to be able to select a bone and press control alt and S to change the thickness of this B bone and this can be very useful when doing complex rigging with a lot of overlapping bones now the new shortcut is control alt shift n s and all I can say is you got to be kidding me if you're rigging you're going to hate this so here is one way to adjust your key map go to edit preferences key map and search for Save and find a shortcut that says control alt and S that is your increment m al save and just disable it so you won't have a shortcut for incremental save but unless you saving every 5 Seconds you should be fine then look for B bone and you have scale B bone under pose and Armature so this is the same thing for pae mode and edit mode so expand both and untick shift and now I should have the all behavior of control alt and S and if I want to save increment inally I just have to go to file save incremental next we have rigify blender integrated outer rigging system as always it is not enabled by default so enable it from the addons and the basic workflow with the predefined Met rigs has not changed much you'll be able to use them as before however if you want to go deeper and customize your rigs a lot has changed to make rig if I work with the new bone collections this affects the Met setup and that will require a separate video to cover properly and I think it's about time to update my rigify courses one thing I will tease though is that in blender 4 you will now have access to a new spline tentacle rig type and I'm sure that all of you who need to rig tentacles for various reasons will rejoice and a quick word about compatibility of rigify rigs that you bring from all the versions of blender into blender four here I'll open a rigify rig that I created in blender 3.6 and it will mostly work but the rig layers will not be visible because of the big bone collections changes so ideally you should have your meta rig as a general rule keep your meta rig around select your meta rig go to the amateure Tab and you'll have a button to upgrade the meta rig to the new system regenerate your rig and you should be all set and you'll have your rig layers speaking of braking changes they are to be expected in such a major release in general you should be able to bring your data from older versions of blender into newer versions but some problems may occur and they are especially common with rigs P Pico did a really nice guide for upgrading your non- rigify rigs from blender 3 to blender 4 I'll share a link and I recommend watching it I think we managed to cover a lot of Animation in rigging features if you want to make sure that you haven't missed anything you can check out the release notes I usually read animation rigging and I also go to addons and check for any updates to rigify here we also have gltf improvements which can be useful to you if you export to game engines such as Gau and you can also learn about all of the other updates in Geometry notes modeling sculpting shading and so on of course there are also other videos that cover the updates in blender 4 a lot of them will give you a more broad overview of all of the different new features I'll share a link to a couple of them so check them out and finally if you enjoy blender and if you can afford it please consider supporting the development one way to do so is to join the Development Fund but you can also go to the blender studio and join it for a monthly fee and that will give you access to different tutorials by the blender developers themselves and other resources that's all like subscribe and happy blending

Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 72,783

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: Jtse_jUq7rk

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023