Blender Character Animation: Shape Keys

shape keys are a great tool that should be a part of every blender animators toolkit in this video we'll be going through the basics of how to use shape keys we'll go over how to create a shape key how to rig a shape key and how to use shape keys to correct deformation in your rigs so let's look at some quick examples of how I use shape keys in my animations one great example is this bird for this bird I actually just used a shape key for the squawky animation so what I did is I actually hit a model of the bird inside of the bird where I just modeled two models and joined them together and then just animated the shape key on whole frame so that snapped from one to the other now this I do not recommend for long animations because it could become very very cumbersome and pull out your geometry and it's not the most efficient way to do it but for quick little loops like this it's great another place I actually used it as here on my little Bluebird character is that as you move the foot back and forth it's actually activating shape keys to prevent his body from deforming too much another extreme example where you use a shape key is on my Halloween at animation that whole mouth opening is actually just a quick shaped key which you can see here that are just snap open so let's get started here's how you create a shape so here we have my little goober character and we're going to be creating a sad or scared mouth for him to go with this happy mouth so right now this is what we have called the base mesh so if we come over here and you click this little tab right here we can create a new shape key under this twirl down here and it's going to give us something called basis so this is our base mesh and all other shape keys we use will interact with that base mesh so now we're going to create another shape key and we're going to call this one sad when we have this shape key selected and we tap into edit mode we can then begin to edit and all these edits will be saved into our shape key now it's important that you only use the same vertices and not try and add new vertices because what it's going to do is measure from point A to B of each vertices and animate from that when you use the slider so you can edit your mesh any way that you see fit but I think the ways that I find easiest are to kind of use the pole down here so that you can grab and animate large chunks or to switch over into sculpt mode now when you're in sculpt mode in order you can click around but you won't see your sculpt until you turn the value all the way out so just keep that in mind for this example I just need to use the edit mode I'm just gonna go back to edit mode and get started now I'm gonna speed through this process so that you can watch me create the sad mouth for a shape T okay so here we have what looks like a sad now and this is very rough of course we want to change his size and things like that before the sake of speed we're just gonna stick with this for now so how do we animate it well over here we have this little slider right here and this allows us to shift from the base mesh and if we slide it up to a value of 1 that shape key now takes over so now he looks sad so you can see that if we go from there to there we can animate it now we could make this animation a bit better if we just put the mouth in a more similar position so I could go in here and the mouth is kind of already off-kilter so we could straighten that mouth up and the animation look a little more salty but for the sake of demonstration purposes we're going to move forward with this so that's the basics of creating a shape key and how you can use a shape key now to animate a shape key you can actually just put a keyframe on here by pressing I or clicking this little button here for let's turn that up insert another keyframe then on all animated from point A to B that's a pretty ugly animation I know but it gets the point across about how to use the tool so let's go ahead and let's delete these keyframes and let's talk about how we can rig this shaped key for easier animation so let's come over here and let's create a plane and rotate that 90 degrees on the x-axis they're pressed to bring up our proportions up here and now we're going to click this right here we're going to display this as balance and then we're going to go into visibility and turn off showing renders that way it won't show up in our rivers now let's duplicate this and let's make this point too okay let's bring that down to the bottom we're going to parent this square but this rectangle uber and then create a text or tape out by 90 degrees and an edit mode here and call this happy now I'm only going to show you how to make this one little mouth animation but this gives you an idea of how you could do a face right in future videos we'll do a more complicated face grade that's more animator friendly and set up for good indication this is more just showing you the basic solution it was from over here renders doesn't pop up and then we'll parent this next to this rectangle here with keep transform so now we had this control that moves all our other controls and we had this that was our enforcement so what we're going to do is we're going to make this rectangle that as we go up and down it's going to transition from a happy to set things so here at the bottom we'll just say that it's happy and then as we move up up it's it so what we'll do is we don't want to be able to move this all around so we're going to come over here we're going to select our object this object pain and enough period of the transforms we're going to lock everything but the z-axis and now we can't move it anywhere but up and down now we don't want to be able to move it way out of the bounds of what we'll do is we'll come over here to the objects and strength tab which is this little tube looking ion and will come here and will click limit location we're gonna do minimum Z maximum Z we're going to change this to local space and what we're going to do is we're going to first under this we can move things around and here is where we want our minimum Z to be so we will hold ctrl C over that copy that in be minimal and let's say we don't want it to go and further than here we will take that so now we see that across here it's travelling and then we'll turn our icon back on and then now we can see that it doesn't go past that [Music] and just to make this simpler let's do 25 and 1.5 take this got a bit smaller that in closer and there we go now we have a little work in control so now we need to attach the shape key to the range of the square so what we're going to do is we're going to go back to this tab with our shape keys we're going to click here on our Guber we're going to right click our sad shape key we're going to right click the value of our size AP and we're going to hit add driver we're just gonna leave this a default for now I'm going to show you how to use the driver menu so we're gonna come over here we're gonna click down here and change this to drivers we will click R goober and we can see that we have our keys up here we will click put it there press n to bring out this view here I'm just going to scrunch this over a bit close that and now we can adjust the range of our driver and all the settings so we'll go up here click the drivers tab so now that we have that let's choose the object that we'll be following so we're gonna be following our little square right here we're going to do the Z location as the type because we're moving up and down in z space and we're going to do local space so you can see that up here he is fully sad and then her as we come down here he's happy her but he's not although so we can see here that it's defaulted to sad because our value of our square right now is 1.5 and this is the value is measuring since we've told it Z location so if we come down and grab this and drag it all the way down you see that it doesn't get all the way happy and that's because if we go over here we see that it's only at 527 if we click here we says that he's at 5 to 7 so we need to do is change the range of our driver so we're going to click the Guber we're going to come back to our driver over here we're going to change this value so we can change that value by grabbing these handles going up to the F curve and we can change the key value so let's see right now this line represents what the value is at so we'll take this key [Music] left a couple times and as you can see over here until it intersects it there now he's happy it's not when we drag here it was sad too happily and that's the basics of rigging a shape key with a little control like this now in future videos we'll get into full facial ribs and you can have upper corner mouths you can have I've links and you can have how much TV show and a lot of complicated things like that but this is just a basic overview so next let's get into the corrective deformation so let's look at this arm here so here we have an arm and I've already kind of done a rough rig on it but let's look at a common issue that occurs with arm so you rig your arm and then you rotate this key and you see here that we lose all of our shape there and as we know our arms do not collapse into themselves like that so we'll pull it out here so you can see it a little bit easier so this is how you do a corrective shape key so we're going to take this we're going to create our base shape team we're gonna create another shape key we will call this bicep fix and we're going to use sculpt mode for this so we will turn the value up and then we will come over here to our armature we're going to click this so that you see it in edit mode when we're working on it that way the armature kind of stays there then we will switch over to sculpt mode just gonna grab the inflate here and the problem is that it's deflating in here [Music] which is kind of reaching their turn to the strength up make sure you and there we go we also know put a bicep the kind of flex as you can move your arm that way so we can work to move that out a little bit now this is a really low geometry I'm just using it as an example so that renders fast for us now that's not a perfect fix but you could spend time finessing the geometry so let's look at how we would use a bone to drive this shape female now you can use these kind of shape keys all over your ribs so you can use it to fix all various portions that are kind of deforming usually you're going to use it a lot of the arms maybe like when you're doing extreme bends with the body or a lot of times when the leg bends backwards and kinda collapses around the knee so this is useful for all those situations so this is very similar to what we did before we're gonna start by right clicking here and adding a driver again we will leave this blank we will drag this menu out so that we can go to the driver menu we'll have this shape piece selected just for peace of mind I'm gonna switch back to object mode here and just like before we're going to select that key go to driver but this time for the object we're going to choose the armature and then we need to choose that bone that we want to drive it so we want it to be this bone right here which is labeled bone zero zero one we will choose bone zero zero and we need to figure out what axis will rotating so we can see here that we're rotating on the z axis if you look up here when we move it around so we will click here and we will tell it that we want to use Z rotation you can see that something's happened here now let's go to local space and we can see that we have a value of negative two one so we're gonna want this to kind of be the inverse of what it's doing so once it gets here we kind of want our shape key to be fully intact so what we need to do now is we need to use an expression up here which is like kind of like a code we're just going to do some simple math here so that we can invert the number up here so that as we rotate in this will go up so if this is negative one we want them to be positive one so that's simple enough math we'll use an Asterix four times and then we'll do a parenthesis negative one and close that parenthesis and you'll see here as soon as I click there we go now it fills up because the value is now up here you can see it is now instead of negative one point two it is now positive one point two because it is taking the variable which is taking all that information here in this value there's timesing it by negative one to get this value and this value is what drives this value over here so here we go you can see that as we go back out it returns to normal and that's important because if our shape key was active out here this would all look distorted now to go on and do this with the rest of a rig you would just change these variables so let's say this was arm L it would just change this to our ml and then you could do that so on forearm R and leg and body and whatever other bones you were trying to do so that's just a basic overview of shape keys and future videos we're going to get into more advanced rigs but it's important that you understand these basics before jumping in the more complicated rigs thanks for watching this video like and comment and subscribe and hit that Bell notification if you want to see or or if you want to help me out I've picked somebody from the community and their artwork to highlight in the background here in the video I'm gonna start doing them at the end of my videos if you want your artwork to be considered to be tagged here at the end of the videos then please tag me in your artwork on Instagram there's a link to my Instagram in the description below it's southern shoddy again thank you for watching and let me know what future tutorials you want to see and what kind of content you want from this channel

Channel: SouthernShotty

Views: 312,047

Keywords: Blender, Blender tutorial, Blender Animation, Blender intro, Blender 2.8, Blender eevee, Blender Modeling, Blender Easy, Blender easy tutorial, Blender cycles, Blender 3D, b3d, Intro to Blender, CG Geek, adobe, after effects, beginner blender tutorials, beginner blender, nate stuff, blender tutorial animation, blender tutorial modeling, blender shape keys, shape keys, blender character, character animation tutorial, character tutorial, blender character tutorial

Id: YDu6y_2jFg0

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019