[Blender 4.0 RIGIFY] Ch 2: Rigging Basics

in this second part of the rigify course for blender 4 we'll learn the basics of blender bones and armatures and even manually rig a simple character we'll learn how to create bones adjust their positions parent them we'll learn about edit mode and pose mode and even some basic constraints if you already know this stuff it is okay to skip this lesson but if rigify rigs automatically why are we doing this well rigify is based on blender armatures so knowing some Basics is essential and the truth that many people don't want to hear is that even when using rigify fundamental rigging knowledge is important I'm actually considering making a beginner's course in manual rigging it is just an idea for now but stay subscribed and you will hear about it or even better join my Academy website on academy. cd.com where you can get access access to all of my content right now you can get early access to the full rigify fundamentals course for the symbolic price of 399 and in early 2024 the course will actually become completely free so check out academy. CG dve.com that is also where you can download start files if you want to follow along with me in this course now in blender 4.0 we'll start exploring armatures but before that let's create a couple of mesh objects shift a mesh and create three objects that you like and position them something like this now if I select my cone and shift select the sphere the sphere becomes active and I can press control p and set parent to object now if I only select the sphere and move it around you'll see the cone moving with it this is parenting this will be an important concept to understand when working with bones so I want to cover it quickly now if I select the sphere and then shift select the cube and again press contrl p and object then both the sphere and The Cone are children of the cube technically the sphere is a child and The Cone is a grandchild of the cube and a child of the sphere when objects are parented the child moves with the parent and that also applies to rotation and scale this should be enough I'll delete this then press shift St Armature and create a single bone armatures in blender are a special type of object which contains bones just like mesh objects contain vertices and faces armatures contain bones also similar to mesh objects armatur have modes they have object mode edit mode and a special pose mode we create our basic Armature in edit mode and we pose and animate it in pae mode so let's go to edit edit mode and again I'm using this py menu I'll go to edit mode and if I click on this bone I can select it and press G to move it around R to rotate it and S to scale it the bone has two spheres on each end and it's important to remember that the one at the thick end is called Head and the one on the other side is called tail in edit mode you can select one of these ends of the bone and also press G to move it and reposition your bone that way of course you can also use the move Gizmo and rotate and scale but I'll generally use the shortcuts if you want to create another bone you can press shift a and that will create another bone within this same Armature I can move it press shift a and create one more bone another way to create additional bones is to select the tail of a bone and press e and extrude a bone now this these two bones are connected and we'll talk about this in a second yet another way you can select a bone right click and choose subdivide and that will create more connected bones now if I select this single bone and shift select this last bone of this chain and press contrl P again the same shortcut that we used in object mode to par in the meshes this will allow me to parent two bones and we can choose between keep offset and connect it if I choose keep offset you'll see a line indicating the parenting but the child bone will stay exactly as it is if I do this again press contrl p and because I already parented with keep offset it will be gray out so now I can choose connected and that will parent the selected bone to the active bone and also connect it to it so when we extrude or subdivide bones we automatically create bones that are parented and connected to the prev previous bone now I'll parent this bone to this bone with keep offset and if I try to move or rotate this bone you'll see that the child doesn't seem to react to it that is because we are in edit mode in edit mode we set up the default position for the bones so parenting is only indicated by this relationship line here but if I switch to pose mode and rotate this bone you'll see the child moving with it if I rotate this bone the whole chain will move so now parenting works exactly as you would expect it and if I try to move this bone which is parented with offset to this one I can actually move it but if I try to move this one which is parented and connected to the previous bone if I press G it will rotate instead of moving that is because connected parenting does not allow it to move so blender does the next best thing which I guess is rotation now if I switch back to edit mode you'll see that the bones are no longer in the opposed position in edit mode the bones are always in the default position which in technical terms is called rest position in POS mode the bones will be in their pose position if I select all bones with a go to pose clear transform all the bones will snap back to their default or rest position now there is no difference between edit mode and POS mode so these are the absolute basics of armatures let's move to a practical example and we'll be rigging this relatively simple mannequin character you can get it from the resources section on CG dive Academy where you can also watch the course as I said before and I recommend it you can also use your own custom character if you like I'll press shift a Armature and choose single bone and go to edit mode and I want this first bone to become the spine of the character so I'll press G and then Zed to move this bone up but the bone will get lost within the body of the character to avoid this we can go to the amateur modifier viewport display and enable in front this will always display Bones on top of other objects but personally what I like to do is to disable this and enable x-ray here which I can toggle with my extended shading options then I'll switch to side view and scale this bone and position it at the bottom of the spine and the end of the bone at the end of the spine then select the bone right click and subdivide and then expand these options and number of cuts I'll set to two so I'll have three bones you can have a spine with four bones as well that's okay but here we'll go with three bones then grab grab the connections between these bones and align them a little bit in the center of the body make sure that you stay in side view if you're in perspective you may move these bones around and misalign them in side view it's easier to keep things neat now select the tail of the last spine bone and press e to extrude another bone for the neck and once more e for the head we haven't talked about bone names if I select this bone and go to the Bone tab you'll see its name it is called bone the next bone is called bone 002 and the next one 001 so they are all over the place and that will get confusing as your rig becomes more complex you can name the bones any way that makes sense to you I'll name this one spine one this one will be spine two spine three neck and finally I'll name the head and actually if I select the headbone and press F2 this will allow me to rename this bone right in the 3D viewport which can be very handy and the name of the bone was changed then I'll create a new bone press G and x and move it a little bit to the side from the side view rotate it and scale it and then align it with the thigh of the character with this end selected press e and extrude another bone down to the ankle e again and extrude to the toes and E again and extrude to the end of the toes let's look from the front view and make sure that the bones are aligned from the front view as well and finally look through the perspective view as well from the side view make sure that there is a little bit of an angle to the knee do not make the leg too straight and definitely not invert it in the other direction and name the bones this one will be the thigh and because we have two symmetrical legs on the left and right side there is a special naming convention for the left and right side and that is L and this will allow us to symmetrize the Armature later so do not skip this step this bone will be the shin DOL then footl and toll. L the spine is in the center it won't get symmetrized so it doesn't need the L suffix now I need another bone new bones appear where the 3D cursor is located so if I I want to make the shoulder bone I can shift and right click around here and place the 3D cursor and then press shift a and then I want to scale down this bone when working with bones I like to switch to individual Origins now the bone will be scaled down from its head I'll Orient it from the front view and then push it inside the volume of the shoulder of the character from here I can press e to extrude another bone for the arm but now let's say that I changed my mind and I don't want to extrude this bone anymore and I right click to cancel it will seem like I cancel the whole Extrusion but that is not the case if I now press G you'll see the bone is still there so a new bone was created and only the positioning of this new bone was cancelled it is little things like this that can really throw you off when you beginner and that is why I advocate learning the basics now I can delete this bone and let's say that instead of extruding I want to duplicate this bone to get a new bone that is another possibility and then I'll align it with the rest of the character select it subdivide it and align it with the elbow select this part and press e to extrude another bone so we are just practicing different ways of creating bones all always check your bones from multiple views so for example from the top view I'll need to move this elbow to around here and the whole hand to around here and this should go a little bit deeper into the body of the character these bone positions are extremely important for achieving good deformations but since we are just practicing the basics here we won't worry too much about it let's name our bones shoulder L upper arml lower arml and handl now if I switch to pose mode and try rotating some bones around connected bones behave as we would expect but other bones are just disconnected it so we have to take care of this this is simple parenting go back to edit mode select your upper arm shift select the shoulder and press contrl P keep offset select the shoulder shift select the next spine bone crl P keep offset select the thigh shift select the base spine contrl P keep offset now in pose mode this pole moves the whole Armature the shoulder rotates with the spine arm rotates with the shoulder and so on now back to edit mode I can select all of these bones right click and choose symmetrize and that will symmetrize the bones that had the L suffix on the other side of the character and that just saved us a lot of work if I select one of the bones on the right side you'll see that its name also changed automatically to R so the symmetrize function does all of this for us in fact if I go to POS mode now you'll see that even the parenting was adjusted accordingly so this is our basic Armature let me press shift s and cursor to world origin to move the 3D cursor back here and then I can go to object mode select the character and shift select the Armature in this order is very important the Armature has to be Act active then we press contrl P which is the shortcut for parenting and now because we have selected a mesh and an Armature we have some special parenting options and one of them is with automatic weights I'll select it select my armateur and go to pae mode and now if I rotate this bone you'll see that the mesh moves with it so effectively we made this iur deform the m automatic weights is one of these features that beginners love because it's very easy it's just one click and when it works it works like magic the problem is that with more complex characters it may not work I have a separate video all about how to fix it when it doesn't work but ideally you should learn about something called weight painting the mesh is actually connected to the bones with something called weights I can show it visually really quickly without explaining this red color means that this part of the mesh is controlled by this bone I'm going to introduce weight painting a little bit later in the series let's keep it light and simple for now but we are going to dig a little bit deeper into the bone setup let's go back to the armateur pose mode and try to move this spine bone you'll see that I'm moving the whole character and if I wanted the character to squat I would have to push it down then reposition the legs and it is very difficult to animate this way so select all bones go to pose clear transform all and we'll learn about inverse kinematics this will help us solve this problem that we just saw and inverse kinematics is something that you absolutely need to know about when learning to rig let's go to edit mode select this connection here press e and then y to extrude this bone straight in the y direction and then to set up ik ik is short for inverse kinematics we have to go to pose mode I'll select the shin of the character and I'll go to the Bone constraints tab bone constraints and not regular constraints up here in bone constraints I can click on ADD bone constraint and find inverse kinematics and in here I can start setting up the Target and Target and so on but there is a better way I'll delete this select this new bone which I extruded and actually I can press f2 and name it leg i.l then shift select the shin of the character press control shift C and choose inverse kinematics and that will add the constraint but also set up the target bone to be the first selected bone so that is a little nice shortcut now if I try to move this ik bone it will just rotate awkwardly and that is because it is parented and connected to the shin let's go to edit mode press alt p and just disconnect the bone this will keep the parenting but allow the bone to be disconnected then back to puse mode if I try to move this first of all I'm moving the whole character and also there is this weird jittering in the Armature while the jittering is really bad this is a cyclic dependency because of the ike constraint this ik bone is affecting the shin but because it is parented to the shin the shin is affecting the bone and that is a cyclic dependency and blender doesn't like this at all so we have to go to edit mode select this bone and old p and actually clear the parent so I kind of made you make a mistake on purpose um sorry about that but it is really important to experience these problems and to know how to solve them and I think this will help you appreciate Ry because with rify you won't have to deal with these kind of problems at all now back to B mode if I move this bone there will be no more jittering to improve the behavior of the ik I can select the shin bone and set the chain length to two two means that the ik will only affect the first two bones in the chain so the shin and the thigh whereas the default of zero means no limit at all so it will affect the whole character now moving this ik ball naturally moves the leg and if I move the spine you'll see the character bending its knee which is exactly what we wanted the character's foot is sinking through the ground I'll give you a quick solution for that select the foot go to edit mode press alt P clear parent go back to pose mode select the shin shift select the foot press control shift C and choose copy location and that is another constraint which will make the foot always stick to the shin but without being parented to it the foot jumped to the knee of the character that is because we are currently copying the location of the head of the bone if I just slide this all the way down to one which means we're following the tail of the bone then the foot will go to its normal position now if I move this body down the character will Squat and the foot will stay on the ground to prevent this leg from bending sideways I can select the shin go to your bone tab inverse kinematics and lock ik Y and Zed now the knee won't Bend sideways if you select your shin switch to rotation mode and local orientation you'll see that in natural rotation of the knee is on the X AIS and that is why I locked Y and Zed and kept X unlocked so now you should have a working ik mechanism before we move forward it's important to become aware that even though the whole rig consists of Bones some of them actually deform the character and some don't in this case the only bone that doesn't deform the character is the ik bone it's just a control so in the bone tab find the deform option and turn it off when you rig manually you always have to keep in mind which bone is deforming and which not currently this is not a problem because we already applied weights to the character but if I go to object mode select the mesh shift select the armateur contrl p and choose automatic weights I won't do it but if I did it the I bone will also become a deforming bone and that is not what I want so in pose mode bone tab make sure that the deform option is disabled then go to edit mode select the ik bone shift select the shin bone and the foot bone right click and symmetrize the ik bone was symmetrized but that's not all if I go to POS mode you'll see that the ik in this copy location constraint was also symmetrized so if you make some changes to one side of the rig you can just select the bones in edit mode and symmetrize them and additional properties such as constraints will also be symmetrized so now we have this wonderful squatting Behavior we have I controls and there is a lot we can still do if you feel adventurous you can add finger bones we can make the arm ik as well it is the exact same process as the leg although working with non ik arms is a lot more reasonable than legs by the way the opposite of ik is FK or forward kinematics now we can do some rig organization if we go to the Armature tab we have our bone collections which is this new big feature in blender 4.0 bone collections work very similarly to object collections currently all of my bones are on this single collection called Bones if I click on this I icon here they will become invisible so I'll double click this collection and name it spine and then I'll press the plus button to create a new collection and name it arm. L for example and I'll create a couple more collections for each part of my rig now to assign bones to a specific collection I can select these bones that I want to assign press M and choose my collection let's assign the right arm bones M and choose arm. R all of the left leg bones M and choose legl same on the right side now I'll delete the head collection select my neck and head press M and choose new collection and name it head so this is another way to create a new layer and at the same time assign bones to it in one go now clicking this I icon will only hide and unhide the bones that belong to that particular collection another way to make your rig easier to work with is to add custom shapes so I'll go to object mode shift a mesh and create a circle you can create all kinds of interesting shapes for your rigs but here I'll just use a single Circle and you'll see how it will make our rig much easier to work with so back to the rig pae mode I'll select the ik control go to the Bone tab viewport display find custom object and choose the circle in my ik control will become this circular object the behavior is exactly the same it is just a visual thing you can click on the top scale value drag down and then drag to the side to scale this widget up or down holding shift will make the scaling slower again I can go to edit mode right click symmetrize go back to pose mode and I'll have the exact same thing on the other side then I'll select the spine and and choose the same Circle as a shape and give it a rotation of 90 on the X and maybe move it a little bit on the Y and I'll do the exact same thing for the other spine bones and even the neckbone and the head the headbone works well as this uh Halo looking thing at the top of the head let's do something similar for all other bones this is looking good so I'll select all arm bones in the shoulder bone edit mode right click symmetrize go back to pose mode and everything is set up now I can disable X-ray and this is a little bit weird I also have to go to object mode and disable x-ray again and now in pose mode you'll see that I no longer see through the mesh but I can still select the exact controls that I want to select and this leads to a very minimal rig you can still POS your character but you can also clearly see it this rig is in a good shape now it's simple yet quite usable but let's do some adjustments and we'll learn additional rigging techniques now if I want to control the upper leg or the knee of the character I have to enable x-ray select the thigh bone and rotate it if you double tap r it may be easier to rotate it but there is another way to orient the knee which is considered the most traditional way so let's select all bones and go to post clear transform all to reset our rig then in edit mode again enable x-ray select the knee of the character go to side view press e y and extrude a bone on the y- axis select this bone and press alt p and clear apparent move it away from the knee on the y- axis and give it a good distance something like this press f2 and rename it to ik pole. l so this will be the so-called pole Target which orients the direction of the ik chain so in pose mode select the shin go to the Bone constraints and let's set up the pole Target if I press here I will first have to select my Armature when I do another field will become available so the Target Field will let you select an object and if that object is an armateur then you'll be able to select select a bone within the diameter so click in the bone field and look for the pole bone your leg will flip this is normal and can be fixed using the pole angle most likely you will need a value of 90 or minus 90° and it looks okay but if I disable the ik constraint using this I icon you may see a very slight movement of the leg and that's not a huge problem but you can tweak this number slightly until there is no difference between ik on and ik off so a value of - 89.3 did it for me and now moving this pole bone orients the knee something else you could do right now if I select the foot bone I can rotate it and control the foot this way however if I go to edit mode select my fot bone shift select the ik K and press contrl P keep offset in PA mode I can move the ik and then rotate it and that will rotate the foot and that makes my rig controls simpler and simplicity is a good thing also the ik is currently independent from the ik and that can be a good thing but if you want to you can try to parent this pole to the ik control now moving the ik and rotating it controls the whole leg some people may like this some may not so which one you like is up to you pressing alt G alt R will reset the position and rotation of a specific control now I'm happy with this setup so I'll go to edit mode select my shin ik fot mle Target right click and symmetrize and I'll have the exact same setup on the other leg by the way these pole bones are not deforming bones so do you remember what we need to do I have to go to the Bone up and disable the deform option most trigs also have a root bone that is a bone that will move all of the other bones so let's go to edit mode make sure the 3D cursor is in the center of the world if it's not shift s cursor to world origin press shift a to create a new bone name it root from the side view grab the end of the bone enable snapping with these snapping options and move the bone so that it's flat on the ground and isable snapping now I'll parent all bones that are not parented to other bones to the root bone so the hips and the ik bones should be parented to the root bone by the way if I enable this x option here that will automatically mirror any changes that I make to one side to the other side as long as both sides already exist so now if I just press contrl P keep offset you'll see that the right bone was also parented to the root even though it wasn't selected also with this option on if I just move anything on the left side it will move on the right side at the same time so now in POS mode I can move this route and it moves the whole character I'm going to give it a custom object the same Circle and I guess I could give the same circle to the B targets or if I go to object mode and select this circle I'll move it to the side shift d and duplicate it and then in edit mode select all vertices shift d and then press R X90 on the num p and then once more shift d cancel the movement R z90 and this will give me this spherical shape then I'll rename it F2 sphere go to my rig and apply the sphere as the custom shape go to edit mode right click symmetrize and I'll have the same on the other side now I can disable x-ray in object mode and I have this very clean rig we can clean up the Armature even more let's enable x-ray again and select these bones these leg bones will not be used in animation so I don't need to see them I can select them press M new collection and let's call it something like hidden press okay go to the aracha tab find my hidden collection and disable the I icon the toe is still usable so I'll give it a custom object Circle I'm going to squash it a little bit on the y- axis like this edit mode right click symmetrize if as a Finishing Touch I'm going to give colors to these bones this is also something that changed in blender 4 we used to have so-called bone groups which were used to assign colors now colors are a bone property so if I have a bone selected in pose mode and go to the Bone tab just above the custom shape we have these bone colors and I'm only going to set the pose bone color so let's say that I want all Bones on the left side to be red right side blue and all Central bones yellow I'll select all of my left bones or left controls choose the Red theme color and then press this button and that will copy this color to all selected controls select the bones on the right side give them a blue color and copy the colors then all bones in the center pick the yellow color and copy and for the root we can choose a special color like um pink so again this is a nice rig it's simple but usable there is a ton of things that we can improve upon it but if you finish this exercise as a beginner you should congratulate yourself and you can be sure that you probably know more about rigging than most of blender users rigging can be really esoteric and most people just don't know much this will be a solid foundation from which we can proceed with learning about AO rigging with rigify so see you in the next lesson

Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 20,347

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: eoird3MVCNw

Length: 36min 11sec (2171 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 20 2023