Blender Character Rigging - How to Rig a Character - Blender Beginner Tutorial

another day another coffee and in today's video i'm going to give you a bit of an insight into my general process into preparing and rigging my characters for poses but if you're new around here my name is kielen and thank you for clicking on this channel so if you're ready to learn something new start a blender follow along with me and let's jump on into the video [Music] alright before we get started you can either go ahead and rig your own character or feel free to download the one i've supplied a link to in the description that's just going to give you this guy completely and rigged and ready to play around with and if you're a patreon if you haven't seen already you've actually got the full rigged rocket man version of this so that's on the patreon if you need it but as is tradition for this channel let's just have a little sip of our coffees before we continue and let's get on with the tutorial so what we're going to do today well i broke this video down into three little sections for you because somebody did ask it was actually nobody special and that i i don't mean they were nobody special i just mean the actual name was nobody special but remember you are special and you're all amazing so what question did they ask they said what what is your general process before you begin rigging your character so for example what do i tend to do when we come to having all these different separate parts and such and how does this work before you know we start to rig so my general process which may vary between designers i tend to join anything that's part of the main mesh i tend to join them all together so that when we apply our poses and armatures everything is nicely weighted and good to model or pose animate whatever you want to do with this thing so as an example let's go ahead and hide the glasses because we're not going to include the glass in this because they sit on top of the mesh just just just like clothing what we're going to do though is join up the eyes the eyebrows because right now they're all separate objects and the first thing i do before i do this is to apply any existing modifiers on these current objects except the subdivisions because when we join these up to the main body the body already has this subdivision modifier applied and if i was to apply the subdivisions here then when it comes to joining it with this body it's gonna subdivide it again to the point where you've got this crazy amount of subdivisions on your shape which is completely completely unnecessary and you're just gonna crash your computer depending on how strong your computer that is so anyway so what i'm going to do is start from the top let's look at my shape so i'm nothing on there other than the subdivision but i have a solidify modifier here so i'm going to apply that and then the eyebrows i've got a mirror modifier that i need to apply same with the eyes mirror modifier i think it's the same with the ears too yep apply the mirror modifier and i don't think there's anything else i need to apply here nope that's looking pretty good only subdivisions left so all that's left to do is to highlight everything on the head then we're going to shift click on the head to make sure it's the last thing selected and we're going to do control j and what does control j do well ctrl j means join in blender but quick note i am not in blender 2.9 some key inputs or shortcuts may vary with versions so just remember that's the join functionality if it doesn't work for you just see what the shortcut is for your version of blender um you know simple google search but now our character is actually good to rig because if i click on any of these objects now they're all part of the same mesh it's looking good but if you did want to edit these separately they're still technically separate objects so if you tab into edit mode on a character here and hover over the eyes say you can press l and still select these as individual objects should you wish to but i'm going to come out of here and now it's time to move on to adding a basic skeleton to this character and to give you a real world example of how i use rigs and armatures in blender we're actually gonna we're actually gonna take advantage of the riggify add-on now very popular you'll see it you know with lots of different designers i think it came in blender 2.8 but in order to enable it just go into edit preferences and if you search for rig down here you can see we've got riggify just enable that and you're good to go it's going to be really easy to rig and animate your characters so what we're going to do is i'm going to hide this platform we don't need it right now so i'm just going to press h to go to that and let's go ahead and add in a simple meta rig so to do that make sure you're in object mode and we're going to press shift a and now in our armatures down here you've got a couple of new options but we're going to go into basic and just click on the basic human meta rig and what's this right here so i'm going to go into solid view i'm going to press alt z to go into x-ray mode and i'm just going to scale this down so s to scale till it's a run about in line with the size of our character and this is a nice pre-made rig that we can customize and apply to a character to you know start doing some posing and animating so the first thing we're going to need to do is to line everything up nicely so i'm going to tab into edit mode on this here i am in x-ray mode but what you can do is with your armature selected come into our object data properties here for the armature kind of looks like a little stick man down here and then we're going to go into viewport display and turn on in the front and this is just going to make sure that we can see the bones through the mesh no matter where they are okay i know that all that's left to do is to line this up and before we do make sure you come up here to the top right and enable this mirroring option so this is going to mirror across the x-axis so if i move these bones over here it's going to do the exact same on the other side so i'm going to bring these up and i'm going to bring the hand towards the hand straighten this out over here and then i'm going to go ahead and click here shift click over here press x and delete those bones because they are technically breast bones so if you've got a female character or something with breasts in this area then you can use those bones but we have no need today and then let's go ahead and straighten these ones up so i'm just gonna highlight all these pressing g to move i'm gonna go into my right side view and do the same again so i'm just gonna press g to move these over slightly i'm going to highlight all of the foot g to move these over slightly until everything lines up relatively nicely and into my top view because the arm isn't quite there yet so i'm going to highlight the elbow g to move and bring the hand into the center a little bit more we're not going to do each finger because we're going to keep this tutorial nice and basic oh i also need to touch up the head too so back to edit mode into right view i'm just going to make sure that this lines up nicely with the top of the head bring this up so it's sort of in line with head here and straighten out the neck and just bring this over ever so slightly but i think that's most of the rig set up all that's left to do here really now is to do some parenting and so let's go back into object mode and what i'm going to do is i've got the feature as well which is separate object to the body but we're going to appear at the mall to the uh the rig here so let's click on the feet hold shift click on the hands here so i'm making sure that i don't click on the clothes you may want to hide the clothes so just make sure when you shift clicking on the main body click on one of the hands or the head just to make sure you're not clicking on the clothing there and then lastly shift click on the meta rig and then all that's left to do is press ctrl p and in here you've got these options armature deform but we're going to do armature deform with automatic weights and that's done very quickly and what that is going to do is it's going to automatically do its best to apply a weight to each bone which will control its general area of influence on each section of your mesh so if this worked successfully now it should work so if i click on the armature go up here into pose mode click on one of these pieces and do ah to move you can see now that this successfully is parented to our mesh and you might be thinking okay what about the clothes well all you need to do really is to go back into object mode and click on your clothing shift click on your armature and do control p again with automatic weights and if i go back into pose mode once again now it successfully also moves our clothing too and you can use this to do some basic like basic poses and such but what we're going to do is take advantage of the rigidify modifier to go ahead and create a more advanced rig which will help you do some animating and such so let's move on to that now so the rigifi add-on actually makes it super super easy to generate a rig for this character so what i want you to do first is click on our armature here and we're going to do ctrl a and apply a rotation and scale this is just going to make sure that the generated rig is at the correct scale and fits the character really well and then whenever you're ready click on your armature and come over here into our object data properties and click the generate rig button depending on your system this can vary in time but as this is a nice simple rig it shouldn't take us too long so let's go ahead and do that now all right so what is this what is this like interesting looking shapes well initially we don't actually need this armature anymore so i'm going to hide this you could delete it but for the purposes of this tutorial i'm just going to hide it and now we've got this more advanced rig this is a rig that the rigify modifier has set up for us based on the general meta rig that we initially lined up with the character so this you know basically it gave it some variables and now it knows where the elbows are it knows where the knees are and it knows where to bend the joints and how to move the character so all that's left to do is to highlight everything including defeat shift click on the new rig and then do control p with automatic weights once again okay cool and now if we go ahead i'm going to jump into material preview just to make it a little bit more easy for you to see but if i go into my new rig go into pose mode and i'm going to click on this little box we've got a whole bunch of different joints and bits to move now but i'm going to go ahead and click on this box if i press g to move you can see just like that we've got a funky little bit of motion that we can do with this character his knees bend his elbows bend and they all bend generally in the right direction whoop generally in the right direction and give us a nice feature that we can animate with and if you want to reset everything to its original location just press a to select the entire rig and press alt g and alt r to reset the position and location right so you may have noticed we are having a slight issue up near the top here so if i rotate his head notice how his teeth and his mouth aren't following suit they're not playing ball here and this is a good example of situations that can arise due to weight now what is weight so what i'm going to do is if i go into object mode and i click on my mesh here and then go into weight mode you can see it's automatically got it selected for me but if you go into your object data properties and you've got the vertex groups here now in this area we've got a whole bunch of different vertex groups that the rigify modifier created for us i do know that the highest value of spine is going to be where the head is so come right down to the bottom to def spine 0 0 6. if i click on it here you can see we've got this nice color scheme but what does this mean exactly well the darker the color the deeper the red the more influence that that this vertex group has on this general area so you can see that the teeth are blue which means they are not being affected by this current rig so how do we fix that well what we need to do is go back into object mode click on our mesh tab into edit mode and we need to apply a maximum of one weight to the to the teeth here so i'm going to press l and l to select both of these teeth make sure i have the def spine 006 um active and then now we can just click assign making sure that your weight is set to a the one value and now this should have applied the weight to that section of the mesh which means it should now animate so if we go back into pose mode on our character and if i click the section and press r now we can see the teeth successfully also move along with our character and we can just double check that so we go into our mesh back into weight the teeth are now bright red and being affected successfully congratulations you've diagnosed your first weight issue that's if you had the same issue issues may vary okay so if you've made it this far i i do want to say congratulations well done you're doing really well and i want to give you a pat on the back so can you feel that that's that's me patting you on the back well then but the last thing that i'm going to do here is to set up a basic pose for this character and then i'm gonna speed through a general backdrop to you know make it nice and pretty before i render this out and i suppose the challenge i want you to do is to maybe do something a little bit different here and then you can render send it to me on instagram or twitter and then i can put it on my instagram story and show off how cool my subscribers are so with that let's do a little bit of posing on our character here so what i'm going to do to my guy is very basic so i'm going to jump into pose and initially i think i'm just going to click on the central box so this controls his general center of mass i prefer i suppose i'm going to do r and z to rotate him up a little bit to the left and you might notice it is a little bit laggy what i'd recommend as well before i carry on is in my mesh modifiers here i've still got this subdivision which is unapplied i find having subdivision modifiers unapplied on a mesh when you're rigging tends to slow it down a little a little bit i i don't really know why but i expect it's because it's constantly trying to recalculate you know the subdivisions as you're moving around so it might be worth just making a backup then applying any subdivisions on your main mesh that you're looking to rig and then if i go back into posing and go r zed here you can see it's moving much more smoothly and i'm just gonna have a much easier time when it comes to you know posing this guy so i've angled his central center of mass off to the left a little bit i am going to click the little red area for his right foot there and do orange head and angle this off to the left slightly maybe slightly turn his right foot too so when it comes to you know posing him i tend to primarily just stick to these red you know these red sections so i wouldn't really recommend moving these little blue joints in between because they are very fixed so if i stick your arm up like this and start moving around it's a very fixed area so if you stick to the red joints and the yellow joints that should you know be as much as you need really for the most part okay so i'm also going to turn his head back towards me so he's not going to be straight on and then i'm going to bring his hand down to his general hip area i'm going to do r to rotate and then you can double tap r to give you a bit more freedom on the hand rotation i'm just going to move it so it kind of looks like he's got his hand on his hip maybe maybe around around here something like that and then you can you know you can put more time into this but i'm just going to try to make this as quickly as i can and then i'm going to bring his hand up and i do want that elbow to turn the other way so what i'm going to do is click on the red arrows this sort of decides where the elbow is supposed to join uh supposed to bend so i'm going to press r y y twice to rotate it on its local y axis and then just if i can just get this to spin the right way there we go and just so it spends that way and that looks a lot more natural i need his hand as well to be flipped the other way so i'm going to click on the hand to r and x to flip this over so we got the palm of his hand facing upwards might want to bring this up slightly so it doesn't look as you know distorted and then he's like ha ha there's something in my hand i am so childish sometimes i cannot help myself but i think that's looking pretty good all right cool so that's the general pose i want to go with i am going to bring back the platform that we had at the start cool and then i'm gonna add some elements and a backdrop to this and you know show you what i've got before i render this out so i'm gonna skip on in to the next bit let's just go with some sound effects okay so here we are i went ahead and just added a simple backdrop and hovering in his hand is the glorious youtube play button so with that you know as long as you've gone ahead and set yourself up a nice little scene i've gone ahead and lined up my camera to a nice full hd resolution feel free to adjust you know just perhaps 1080 to 1080 in your scene properties in your output output properties if you plan them to post this thing on you know instagram or your other social media but now i'm just gonna go ahead and play around with my render settings before i render this thing out so if you're ready go ahead press render image and let's see how this thing looks and there we have our finished cut oh my goodness i completely forgot to put the glasses one more time i'm just gonna disable the glasses and there we have a nicely rigged character render and that's gonna just about do it for today's tutorial if you did enjoy a like and sub is very much appreciated and if you enjoy the work that i do consider joining my amazing patreons in supporting this channel growth has been fantastic and you guys are amazing but on that note my name is caleb enjoy the rest of your day and i'll catch you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Keelan Jon

Views: 97,129

Keywords: Blender3D, Blendertutorial, Design, Development, 3dArtist, 3dart

Id: qDlJx3J5HX0

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020