Blender: Rig A Character From Scratch | CLEAR BEGINNERS GUIDE

so if you're clicking on this video there's a chance you may want to learn how to do rigging in particular how to rig a character in blender in this tutorial I'm going to take everything I've learned doing character tutorials especially rigging all the mistakes I've made all the things that people specifically ask and I'm going to try and make a very beginner friendly video on how to make a rig from scratch now blender has a lot of cool tools out there that can kind of do this for you roughly but really it is helpful to learn how all of this works so you kind of understand it this is going to be a fundamental thing that you can use especially if you want to get into characters and creatures and stuff like that so everything you see here we're going to start from scratch I'm going to explain every little thing so if you're a beginner you've never done rigging but you're still messing around with blender this is going to be a video that I have specifically try to make as simple as possible I'm going to not only show you how to set up all the rigs all the bones but how to specifically only make everything on one side and then mirror it over automatically with some cool Nifty tools and blender over to the other side I'm going to teach you about the proper extensions I'm going to teach you how to use cool little constraints so we can add control bones that affect different parts of the rig so we don't have to like come in here and you know little by little do this kind of like animation like this we have these cool little Tools in here that just allow us to work a lot more dynamically when we're animating I'm going to show you guys some what the difference is between inverse kinematics and forward kinematics how to use targets to help things out and I'm going to be keeping it really simple like I said so I don't want to go rambling too much in this intro I just really want you guys to understand that this is going to be the tutorial for you if you want to get into rigging if you want to understand how it works if you want it to make sense and if you're still learning if you're new to this sort of thing so let's jump into it and rig up our little character just a quick note you could use your own character but I'm going to quickly spend the first few minutes just showing you guys where you can get a character if you don't have one if you do have one just skip to the part in the video where I start the rigging so you don't have to waste time getting the one that I'm going to present so let's jump into it okay so what I'm going to do real quick is I'm going to show you where you can get a free character if you don't have one and you want to follow along so this side here is called Adobe miximo all you have to do is just go www.miximo.com it'll come up with it and you're going to go to the character section once you've created a free account and uh just scroll down and you're going to get to one here that's the mannequin that's just one piece of mesh and once you click on it you can just go use this character now with Adobe mix mode the cool thing is it actually kind of creates a rig for your character and adds motion data to it but this is kind of like a very basic rig and doesn't give you any controls so we're not going to worry about the animation here we're just going to click on a mannequin and we're going to go to download and we're just going to leave everything as it is and leave it in a t-pose which is the default here anyway and the fbx I'm just going to go download now I've already done this okay so I'm just gonna cancel shoulders right and this was the downloaded file right here so then you're going to go and you're going to open blender real quick and you're just going to go to file you're going to go to import choose the fbx option then go to your desktop wherever you downloaded that fbx to click on it fbx and here you can see it's been imported now what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this guy here and because it we want to create our own rig we're just going to go alt p and we're going to go clear and keep transform we just want to clear any parents so this doesn't have any relation to the rig that it comes with and then we're going to just delete that rig and we're just going to select the character we're gonna go s and just scale them a little bit bigger so it's about this big relative to the cube we're going to go Ctrl a or command a and we're going to apply the scale that's really important um we want all of the transforms to be set we can also go Ctrl a and apply that rotation okay so if you now press n to bring up your properties panel and you go to item you should see that the scale values here are all set to one and it shouldn't be anything under rotation because we've applied at those vectors we're then going to select the default Cube and just delete it and the same with the objects in the scene we just want our character here now if You tab into edit mode by pressing tab you can see it's quite a high dense mesh here what I'm going to do is with everything active just press a to select everything I'm going to type in F free and I'm going to search on and then sub and I click on mesh on subdivide okay now it's a little bit messy but it's just to demonstrate here now it's a bit lower topology and you can keep the material I'm just going to hit Z and go material preview you can see this guy here comes with a material I'm just going to go ahead and get rid of that because we're just doing um the practice here for the riggings now we have a character um if you skip this bit to do your own character that's fine just for those of you who didn't have a character now you have one make sure to go and save this somewhere on your computer I'm just going to call it something appropriate for me and I'm going to save it so now we're going to do is we're going to add in our Armature but just a quick note just in case you might not be aware of this if you're an absolute beginner and make sure that your character is in the middle of the scene now thankfully this one came imported in the right position if your character is off to the side we're going to be adding in the Armature right here where that 3D cursor is so make sure everything is nice and lined up in your front view and in your side orthographic view like this okay in this case it should be fine we're also going to make sure that our 3D cursor is also in the middle so shift s and cursor to world origin okay just a few things you want to be sure of so it's nice and in the middle because we're working with symmetry here we're now going to go shift a and we're going to go down to this option here called Armature we're just going to click on that it's going to add in a single bone over here right now it's important to note that this bone in our object mode if you actually go up here to a scene collection this is actually a system it's a collection of bones that are contained inside of this thing here called the Armature okay if you go down under the Armature dropped in you can see there's currently just one bone listed and if you actually go into edit mode or you just press tab to go into edit mode you can now see that if you click on Armature it's not selecting anything because that's the whole system but if you click on bone it selects that bone and if you go over here to the Bone properties you can actually see this is the name of the bone here here so if we call this main which I'm going to do so call it Main this is our main control bone you can now see over here it's called Main and if you actually go up to your object properties you can see that this is called Armature now make sure when you're renaming a bone that you don't accidentally go to this one up here or this one up here this is the overall system name here that's what we call the Armature you can call whatever you want but what we're interested in when we're naming is naming these individual bones underneath this group called Armature okay if that makes sense so let's now take this main bone over here let's select this top nub at the top you can actually click on that knob and select it I'm going to go g z and bring it down so our bone is a little bit smaller we're then going to click on this bone and we're going to go shift d to duplicate you can right click to let go and then you can go g to move it and if you press Z after you've pressed G you can limit it to the Z location but you can see now it's um we can't really see it inside of our character I've moved it up in there if you go Z and you go wireframe you can see that another thing you can do is if you're in solid mode it's just enable the X-ray here which is what I'm going to do you could also and I'll quickly mention this in case you don't know let's just say you were in solid you can go over to your object data properties you can go over to viewport display and you can go in front and it doesn't matter where you're looking from your bones will always be in front of the mesh or whatever you're working with I'm going to turn that off and I'm just going to rely on the X-ray over here if you want to toggle that on and off you can go alt Z and then go alt Z again and that's just a shortcut for that in x-ray mode now let's take this new bone and that's just called main.001 let's now come here let's go to our bone and this is called this hip because this is going to be our hip bone we're just going to go g z and move it down until it's sitting more around here we're going to select that top knob we're going to go g z and bring it down now if you're making a more complex rig generally I would have it like this so we can rotate at the hip because this is where it's actually going to be pivoting but we're trying to keep things a little bit simpler here so we're just going to leave it as it is for now in this case so about here and we now have a hip bone and we're going to go into a right orthographic view by pressing three on a number pad I'm going to select this top knob and we're going to go g and move it forward okay something like this because we have this curvature in the spine now currently if we were to go into our pose mode where we would control these bones and we selected our main rig or our main control bone as you can see here under our pose because over here now we're into pose mode so this is um a little bit different the way you select things so if you select the main bone you can see if we moved out the other thing doesn't go along so we need to actually fix that let's go back into edit mode select our hip we're now going to hold in shift and then click on our main bone and if you now go Ctrl P you can go make parent and click on keep offset now you're going to see this is black line and if we were to go into our pose mode and select that main bone under our pose you can now see that that bone goes along in fact you can actually see the domain bone here under the pose now has a little drop down which means that the hip is now a parrot or child of this main bone and that's called a hierarchy that's going to be very important when we're working with bone okay so let's quickly go back into edit mode we're now going to select this knob here at the top and inner right orthographic view we're going to move it up just a little bit and we're now going to go e to extrude I'm going to extrude it about halfway here they're going to click on this new bone come here to our drop down and you can see it's now under hip because it's been extruded from the hip bone so it is under the hip this has hierarchy hierarchical structure over this new bone and let's just double click on that bone let's call it spine underscore one you can also just come here and click on a bone properties and just name it that way if it's easier we're now going to select this nub up here and we're going to go e to extrude and let's just um so we could either just make this the chest which I'm going to actually do in this case but yeah sometimes if I'm rigging if I was making a more advanced rig I would actually use bendy bones and there would be a whole bunch of little segments in here to kind of act like vertebrae but for now let's just call that um this one over here between called spline this is called spline it does have one spine bone okay just to keep things simple for beginners and let's select this bone here now the new one that we've extruded and let's just call it chest okay that's the chest bone I'm going to take this one maybe select the knob here at the bottom and just move it up just a little bit and then move this one over here in the middle okay so if you now go to your front orthographic view by pressing one on the number pad you can see everything is nice and in the middle and in the side it's looking nice and curved we're going to now select this top nub on the chest bone I'm going to go e to extrude and this is going to be our neck so let's click on that let's go over here and call it neck and then select the top knob and you can kind of see where we're going with this we're going to go e to extrude and extrude it up and we're going to click on that new bone and let's call it head so now we have a bunch of Bones here and if you were to go into pose mode and select this main bone here and go g you can see everything has the hierarchy structure to that and if you were to select this hip bone and you go R to rotated or G to move it you can see the other bones that have been extruded from it are under its control this is called forward kinematics because you'd be working your way up the chain of Bones if you wanted to animate something right you'd have to go select each one and then control it that way now there is something called ik which is where we add a controller and it's inverse kinematics and we're going to get to that in a little while but just so you understand what's going on here okay we have a hierarchical structure going on that's very important to get when you're a beginner let's go back to our edit mode and what we're going to do is everything so far has been in the middle but we're going to now start modeling only on one side and then we're going to mirror it over but naming is going to be important here the extensions that we use so what we're going to do is we're just going to select our main bone down here in the front of a graphic View and go shift d to duplicate it then just move it all the way up here I'm going to go R and we're going to rotate it out this way so the fat end is at the bottom here I'm going to move that in and we're going to grab this bit here I'm going to go g and move it in now some people when they're making a really simple rig we'll just start the arm here and this would be your lower arm bone but I'm going to make this a clavicle okay so I'm going to place it right here and under my bone properties I'm just going to call it clav for clavicle and then I'm going to go into my right or for graphic View and I'm going to select this knob here I'm going to go g and move it more to the middle of the arm and that's our clavicle now the problem is if we go back to pose mode if we now move our main bone you can see that no longer has a connection there so what we need to do is Select this clavicle in edit mode and holding in shift select our chest bone and then go Ctrl p and then go keep offset now this is parented to the chest bone okay now we can select this nub here and we can move it to over here and what we're going to do is we're going to go e to extrude I'm going to extrude it to the middle here and then we're going to go to our top orthographic view by pressing 7 on a number pad and we're going to move it back a little bit we want it in the middle of the arm here and then we're going to go e to extrude move it to where the wrist is and then e to extrude and that's going to be the hand now we're not going to be making fingers in this one here we'll just keep it basic just for so you can understand basic concepts let's just select this hand bone in the top view and go g and move it over here and then select this little knob and straighten things out now if you were going to make fingers you would simply just duplicate a bone and then place it here where the fingers are and extrude a whole bunch more like this and then parent that to the hand all right so that's kind of what you do it's pretty simple but for now I'm not going to go that way I'm just going to delete that so make sure also in the front view that all looks okay and what we have here is the clav if you look over here under the bone properties let's just call this one over here upper arm and this is going to be very very important dot capital L now it's very important that it is a capital if you do small letter L it won't work if you do comma L if you do underscore L at Point work it has to be dot the period on your keyboard capital L now this might be to your right as you're looking at the screen but it's actually the left side of the character and that's why we're doing Dot L make sure you don't get that confused a lot of people who window beginners kind of get that mixed up we're going to also select the clavicle and put a dot capital L next to it then we're going to select the lower arm and we're going to go lower arm and then dot capital L it doesn't really matter what you name these bones but a DOT capital L is super super important we're then going to go and select the hand and let's call it hand dot capital L and guess now all of these have the extension dot capital l and later on we can mirror it over automatically and it'll automatically name it appropriately appropriately with the dot capital r we'll get to that in a little while so let's quickly go into pose mode and I'll show you something at this point if we wanted to animate this later on we'd have to go for each bone and work our way down the chain okay and that's not something we want to do we want to work a little bit more efficiently so let's set up a simple ik so we're going to go back to edit mode and we're going to select this knob over here behind a hand and in a front view we're going to go e to extrude and z and extrude it up into Z then we're going to select this bone and we'll go alt P because it's going to be a control bone we want it to be separate and we're going to go disconnect bone and then we're going to go alt p and we're going to go clear parent we don't want it to have any relationship to the bones around it and then we're going to take this bone over here the hand bone and we're going to hold and shift and select that ik bone and go Ctrl p and go keep offset okay so now if we go into pose mode we can select this bone here and go g to move it R to rotate it but the problem here even though that is controlling our hand bone it's not controlling the rest of the arm so what we're going to do is we're going to select this ik we're holding in shift we're going to select the lower arm bone then if you go Ctrl shift and C or command shift and C you're going to go here and select inverse kinematic now this bone has a power over this bone here so let's select this lower arm bone let's go over to our object constraints sorry I meant to say the um the bone constraint properties and now we want to go and increase the chain length so now if we go one it increases to this one bone if we move it up to chain this now has control two bones down the chain with just this bone and if you went three it would be this one and so on up to hierarchy but what we're going to do is now select this control bone G to move it and you can now see this is what we have it's controlling those two bones and a hand now by the way if you move anything in pose mode all you have to do is go a to select everything and then alt G to reset anything you've moved and ALT R and to reset anything you've rotated or alt s if you've scaled anything okay the main thing is is that in pose edit mode and when we move something that's a bit more permanent so now we have an ik here right the thing is as well just quickly back in pose mode if we were to actually select our chest here and rotate it you can see that hand goes nowhere now if we selected the main bone here and when G to move it in pose mode it's even worse his hands just going to be floating there so let's go back to edit mode let's select that ik bone and holding in shift select a chest then go Ctrl p and then go keep offset now back in pose mode you can see if we grab the chest and rotate it now that is a lot more appropriate we could actually move the hand then select the chest and move it and that'll still move so press a to select everything alt G alt r to set those transforms back so this is a little bit complicated maybe if you're a beginner but remember we can actually parent all of this over to the other side when we're done so it's not too big of a deal so now we're going to do the exact same thing but we're just going to be doing it now with the leg which is pretty much just as simple and then we'll go on to parent it all over so now that we're in edit mode what we're going to do is we're going to actually select our hip bone here in the front orthographic view in edit mode we're going to go shift d to duplicate and move it over then we're going to select the top pointy part I'm going to point it down remember because this is actually the bit that's pivoting where it's pivoting and instead of pointing it down like that let's just select a whole bone and then go R to rotate it or before you even rotate it let's just go into our right orthographic View and just straighten that out a little bit and then bring that knob down okay so it doesn't twist as much now this is going to be our top bone okay so we're going to put the top bit here and then a right off graphic view we're going to bring it a little bit more in the middle then we're going to select the bottom knob all right and I'm going to go g and bring that down to the knees and then the right orthographic view I'm just going to bring it more forward now you don't want it more back or too much in the middle you want a little bit more forward so this is kind of like a v a little bit of a bend a Delta and then you're going to go e and you can extrude that knob down to where the ankle is and then go to your front view and then go g and make sure to match that up like so you can see these bones are a little bit um Twisted so if you actually select the bone and you go Ctrl R you can actually rotate it if you just went R by itself this would happen so go Ctrl R and just rotate it just so it straightens out a little bit you can do the exact same thing with this bone here Ctrl R and just rotate it a little bit now it's just a little bit neater like so so now let's take this bone at the top I might move it down just a little bit more let's select this top bone and let's call that leg or maybe even upper leg dot Capital Elder dot capital L is really important then select the lower leg and go lower leg dot capital l okay and then select the bottom nub here and let's just maybe move it down even a bit more to where the ankle would be that's not really the ankle and then go e to extrude and usually I would make a two part foot like this but what I'm going to do here just for simplicity's sake let's just bone the we've extruded let's just move that out and that'll be our foot okay um so this one here I'm just going to select as well and go Ctrl R and just rotate it just to straighten it out just a little bit and let's name that foot dot capital l so now we have all of these named but let's also just select that back and middle knob here and let's go e to extrude and Y and extrude one out into Y and I'm also going to just go Ctrl R of that one just rotate it out a little bit this is going to be our ik so let's just come here and call that foot underscore ik dot capital l because that's going to be our control just like this one up here is going to be our we haven't actually named the the hand bone here right let's make sure to do that let's just call that hand underscore ik dot capital L you don't have to call it ik it just helps to remember but a DOT capital L is always really important so now we have our two ik bones here and with the one down here at the foot let's go alt P to disconnect the bone and ALT P to clear that parent we don't want it to have any relationship with the bones here and we also want to take this bone here at the top the upper leg bone and holding in shift after selecting that one click on the hip Ctrl p and go and then go make parent keep offset we're also going to select this ik bone down here holding in shift select the main control bone afterwards go Ctrl p and go keep offset so now if we go into our pose mode we're going to do the same thing here we're going to select our ik bone holding and shift afterwards select the lower leg bone and go Ctrl shift C or command shift C and go inverse kinematic and now this bone here has dominance over this bone so now let's select that yellow bone go to the bones constraints and let's make it two on the chain length so it affects two bones up the chain so if we now grab this in pose mode and we go g you can see those two bones go along we can also just go back into edit mode quickly and then select our foot bone holding in shifts like our ik Ctrl p and go make parent keep offset our little character rig is really coming along you know you grab that hip you can test it grab the main control you know rotate to chest you can you know mess around with the ik here on the arm all sorts of really cool stuff um but what we're going to do now is we're going to quickly add in some Target bones so you can control the rotation of the knee otherwise it's going to be really hard to control it and you can do the same thing with your arms but we'll just do it if the knees here because it's oftentimes very important when you're working with the legs so let's just quickly go back in to edit mode I'm just going to select this nub over here and we're going to go e to extrude and then y I'm going to extrude forward onto y then with that bone we're going to go alt p and we're going to go disconnect bone and ALT P clear parent and then go g y and move it forward about that much and let's go to our bone constraints or bone properties and let's just call that leg Target dot capital l and what we're going to do is we're going to go into our pose mode we're going to select this bone over here that we added the constraint to let's go over to our bone constraints and let's get a pull Target click on this little eyedropper and then select our Armature so that tells us the system we're using and then let's find that bone so that is our leg and we called it leg Target dot L and let's click on that now not only can we grab this I can control the bone the the leg we can also use this guy here now you notice that there's an issue of the rotation so what we're going to do is we're going to select this bone here and we just have to come here to the pole angle and make it 90 and press enter and that should be correct for the rotation so we can now come here and you can see this gives us a lot more control over the direction of our leg okay now this is a little bit of homework for you guys you can do the exact same pull targets thing with the arm and put the target at the back here the exact same way we just did that so that's going to be a bit of homework for you guys and the exact same way we just did that with the leg so you call it leg Target and you'd go in there and add it as a Target with this lower arm here okay so now you kind of get where we're going with this I'm going to press a to select everything all G alt R and ALT s and make sure that everything is named appropriately everything has a DOT L extension one thing we're going to quickly do though before we go on to Parenting or mirroring all of this over to the other side is we're going to tell blender what objects we want to affect the mesh and what objects we don't so you can see all of these bones in here they're our deformation bones and if I was working professionally in the industry like I used to I would call these def underscore and then a name and that's just kind of what the industry standard for like deformation bones and anything that is a control bone would be c-o-n underscore and that would be your control binders and usually your control bones don't have any sort of deformation effect on your geometry so if that sounds complicated essentially we just don't want any of these bones that are not inside of the mesh here or not doing anything except controlling the deformation bones to not have deformation so a simple way to do that is to select the bones like for example the main bone here go to the Bone properties and then just go and untick the form okay so any of the ik bones like the one here in the foot untick the form the one here on the hand untick the form and then the pull Target is also just a control so we can untick the form for that as well all of the bones that are inside of the mesh here they need to be deformed because once we parent this we want our mesh here to automatically add these vertex groups now I'm just going to go ahead in fact while we're here quickly just make sure you're in pose mode and select a character mesh just come here to the drop down if you use the same character that I'm using just come to the drop down here under the vertex grips under the object data properties and just go delete all groups because this is just some of this junk that came in from the old rig when we imported this from miximo right we just want a blank slate there so we're going to be anything here that is going to be parented any of these boats bones that are going to have an effect on this mesh this mesh here will have a bunch of vertex groups that tell these bones what bits of the geometry to use but we're going to do that automatically so if that sounds complicated don't worry blender has is going to do that pretty good right out of the box for us it's just a click of a button so let's go back in to our rig let's go into edit mode and at this point we can now go in a front or for graphic View and select all of the bones that have the dot L extension so all of these bones here you can hold and shift click on any ones that aren't selected and in a front of a graphic just so we can see it nicely now go to Armature and then go symmetrize and now every single bone should be symmetrized like this we can now go into pose mode and just test this you can see here okay that's all working cool this one works this one works here really really cool stuff now if you grab the main control you can see that these Target bones are left behind so let's just quickly go into edit mode just hold and shift and select both of these Target bones and while you're still holding in shift select the main control Ctrl p and then go keep offset now back in pose mode we can kind of see if we grab a hip here okay everything stays there you can control our head we can rotate our chest our spine our hip once again keep in mind this is not usually how you do a hip but for simplicity's sake that's how we're doing it we can grab a foot we can rotate it we can move it okay everything is looking really good here so now let's go into object mode let's undo our x-ray toggle we don't need to see that our x-ray mode here and let's now select the mesh and then what we're going to do is we're going to hold in shift and select our Armature in object mode and if you now go control P you're going to go now to with automatic weights and just in a second if you now select your Armature or your character under the object data properties you're going to see all of these bones that we named now are automatically given access to certain parts of this character mesh and we can now actually select our Armature and then go into post mode and now let's just turn X-ray on quickly now if you select your control bones look at that now you can see things are a little bit messy here get into that in a while in a little bit some of these deformations but overall blender did a really good job at doing this kind of right out of the box right you can see here look at that so congratulations if you've made your first rig this way remember if you've moved anything just go a to selected all alt G alt R and if you've scaled just go alt s which I haven't so I'm not doing that but you can see here it all works so let's quickly go back into object mode and this video is getting a bit long so I'll quickly cover this if you select your Armature and then holding and shift you select the mesh you can now go and go into white paint and if you hold in control and left click on any of these bones you can actually see the weight now the warmer a color is the more influence that bone has on the mesh the cooler it is the less that is and you can go control holding it in click on all the other bones and you get the idea here so what you can do now is you can actually just control left click on a bone then you can come to all of these painting tools here and you can go to draw for example you can increase the strength the weight and you can go f to grow the brush just like you can do with any other brush and blender and at this point you can come in here and you can kind of white paint and make warmer the areas that you want us to have more influence on right and this is pretty self-explanatory so for example if I go Ctrl left click on this bone here I might want to go and go subtract and paint away some of this influence here so it doesn't affect the neck bone doesn't affect the head as much so yeah it's pretty simple stuff but this is not really what the video is about this is more about learning how to use um in fact if you go control and left click on any of these control bones you can see the mesh just goes pink because we turned off deformation so it didn't create any groups for that so now you guys kind of see how all of this works it's now magic going on here it's just really good um tools built into blender so I hope you guys have understood this tutorial that you kind of like the basics of it and I hope you can really like this video and it's been a help to you if you want to support the channel you can support me on patreon and you can check out some of my content on skillshare all of that is in the description below and you can even sign up for free for one month to my skillshare classes and I have a lot of really cool blender stuff on there that's been really popular on skillshare so feel free to check that out in the description below let's go back into object mode I'll be uploading this example to my patreon anyway but yeah that has been a tutorial and I'll see you guys next time for a another one

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 45,444

Keywords: blender tutorial, how to model in blender, how to use blender, blender, blender tutorial for beginners, Rigging for beginners, Absolute Beginners Blender, Easy rigging Blender, Rig Character Blender, Blender rigging easy, Blender character tutorial, Rig a person In Blender, 3D rigging, Rigging a person In Blender

Id: eCtSviaHZ6U

Length: 33min 59sec (2039 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2022