Blender Character Kitbashing - Part 7: Simplifying the Armature

welcome back to the next stage of my character kit bashing tutorial series when we last left off we just finished kit bashing this character now it's time to bring him to life this stage will be split up into a series of videos each covering a different topic these will include simplifying the armateur daz Studio Doric posing and expressions the first thing we're going to do is go over to the collection which houses the main Armature and rename that to Main main character then create another collection inside it and call that main character Parts open up the main Armature select all the objects inside it and then place them all into the main character Parts folder click the disable selection button on the collection this will make the character's mesh unselectable making it easier to select the Armature now the main problem with this Armature is that it has too many bones and the majority of these bones we don't even need as they're for making the fabric react to in-game physics so we need to remove these but we don't want to delete them as they could cause issues with the weight paint the first thing you need to do is go down to the waist area select this bone in the center not the bone on top but the one underneath this is the anchor bone you'll be able to tell as you will see these dotted lines coming out in a cross shape the anchor bone is like the center of gravity of the character and it's where all the corresponding bone connections meet in fact if you zoom out and rotate this bone you'll see that the entire character moves with it so what I need you to do is follow these dotted lines which will lead to Joint bones and select them let's start with the legs so select the hip bones remember the joint bones are underneath the physics bones follow the dotted lines down and select the knee bones then select the ankle bones and the toe bones go back up and select the waist bone follow the dotted line up through the torso's bone chain until you reach the shoulder bones select the neck bones then select both the shoulder and the elbow bones select both wrist bones and then select all the bones in the hand now once all the joints are selected go to Armature data you will see a menu called bone collections within that you'll see a layer click on that layer and delete it now click on the plus button call it joint bones then click assign if you unselect all the bones then go over and press the select button all the joint bones will be automatically selected go up to the select dropdown menu and press invert now all our physics Bones have been selected go over and create another layer call that hidden bones and then assign those bones now click on the visibility icon to hide the fabric bones do a stress test to make sure that we haven't missed any joints on the hands you can see that this wrist bone is actually a fabric bone to remove it select it go over to the Joint layer and select remove then click on the hidden bones layer and click assign do the same for the other side continue stress testing then hide the joint bones and check the hidden bones for any missed joints this belt bone will come in handy later on when we start posing but it's currently warping the accessories on the Torso unhide The Joint bones you will see that it sits on top of the anchor bone to fix the warping we just need to do some basic weight painting so first with this bone selected go to edit mode hold the belt bone up slightly then go back to pose mode go to layers and click remove on the hidden bone layer then select the joint bones and press assign now we need to fix this weight paint issue go to object mode and select the Armature and click on this bag which is being warped go to Weight paint mode now double click on the Belt bone make sure your weight value is set to zero press contrl X to fill the object go back to object mode select the Armature then select the body armor then go back to weight paint mode select the belt bone again then press crl X that will fix our weight paint issue go back to object mode select the Armature and go to pose mode check for any more weight paint issues clear the transforms to reset now that all our joints are organized the next thing we need to do is collor code our bones this will make posing more easier as we'll be able to see the bones more clearly and identify points of interest in pose mode go over to the dat menu and press select go over to the Bone menu and click on the viewport display you will see two menus labeled default colors click on pose bone color you will see a list of colors feel free to use whatever color you want for me personally I'm going to use orange then click on the button to the right that will copy the color to all the bones you have selected on your skeleton I recommend giving the hands two unique colors because if have gotten a bit too big you can just box select them and while holding shift scale them down go back to pose mode you can now see that we have a much less cluttered and much more visible Armature now that concludes simplifying this rig but this series will be about posing so let's get some things set up for later on down the line first of of all we need to give this character a weapon since he's supposed to be a Soviet nuclear Survivor but he's unarmed luckily for you I created two videos on how to rig and kit bash an aks74u so we're going to be using this when we pose our character I personally will be using this version equipped with the 545 magazine and the pbs4 silencer go to x-ray mode select all the visible objects then right click and C copy back in your character blend file create a new folder and call it aks74u now go back to object mode right click and paste object it will come in quite big before we scale it click on the ak's collection and create a sub folder open the ak's amateure select all the parented objects and move them over to the new collection rename that folder to Parts click disable selection on the parts folder now only the Armature can be selected scale the AK down slightly so that it's easier to manage move it over to the character and make it smaller go to a top down View and rotate it 90° position it next to the character's chest this will give us a good idea of the scale of the AK in proportion to the character let's make it a little bit smaller currently it doesn't need to be a completely accurate scale just an approximation later on when we start posing this character we can adjust the scale to meet our needs for now I'm just going to leave it here at this scale now in preparation for this next video which will cover Daz we're going to set up this AK so it can be imported into Daz as a prop turn off disable selection for the ak's parts then right click on the ak's main collection and select objects go to file export obj then export it into your kit bash project as da AKs and that concludes this video on simplifying the character's Armature the next stage of this series will come in two parts the first will be a standalone video which will show you how to install and set up D Studio the second will show you how to pose a character with indas which will be much easier and much more realistic than doing so in blender after which we will then import that Dazz model into our blender scene so we can reference from it when posing our kit bashed [Music] character

Channel: Armoured Avian

Views: 111

Keywords: Comic, Book, Game, 3D, 2D, Digital, Characters, Story, Blender, Kitbash, Tutorial, Series, Models, Weight, Painting, Modeling, Clothing, Sketchfab, Learning, Project, Download, Teaching, Editing, Dressing, Sculpting, Beginner, New, How to, Armature, Skeleton, Weights, Face, Posing, Bones, Bone

Id: GK0W8ScFFZs

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024