Character Rigging for Beginners (Blender Tutorial)

in this beginner tutorial i'm going to show you how to do character rigging in blender so in this blender tutorial we are going to be rigging this basic character right here and i'll even show you how to set up the ik rigging the inverse kinematics so that you can just move one bone and it will move the entire arm or the entire leg now if you already have a basic character that you want to rig then you can just use your basic character and use this tutorial to rig it or if you'd like to learn how to create this character then i have a tutorial on basic character modeling for beginners so you can check out that tutorial with the card right up there on the screen and the link in the description and in that other tutorial i show you how to model this basic character or you can also purchase the project files for this tutorial and if you purchase the project files then you will get this character as well as the finished rig so if you'd like to purchase the project files then you can get that on my gumroad store and my patreon page the links will be in the description and also checking out my gumroad store and patreon page are really great ways to help support me and this youtube channel and then just one other thing before we get started i want to give a huge thanks to this video's sponsor blender grid blender grid is an easy to use render farm specifically designed for blender i've used the service and i highly recommend it upload your blender file or a zip file with the blend file and textures you can change the render settings on the website before rendering blender grid will let you know the cost before you start the render you can even choose when you want the render to finish if you're on a tight deadline while it renders you can check the rendered frames to make sure everything is rendering properly once it finishes just download the files and compile the frames in a video editor use the link in the description to get twenty dollars of render credit on your first render all right so here is the basic character that we're going to be reading in this tutorial now as i mentioned earlier if you'd like to learn how to create this character then i have a tutorial on basic character modeling in blender links in the description if you'd like to check out that tutorial or you can also help support the channel by purchasing the tutorial files and when you purchase the tutorial files you'll not only get this character that you can use to rig but you'll also get the finished rigged character so because we're going to be rigging this character i need to apply the mirror modifier because if i tab in edit mode we used a mirror modifier so that we could just model one side of the character so i just need to apply the mirror modifier so right over here on the modifier properties you can just click on the mirror modifier just make sure that it is selected and then with your mouse hovered over the modifier you can press ctrl a and that is going to apply the modifier so if you tab in edit mode there's geometry on both sides alright so now we need to add bones and then we can create the armature or the bones for the rig so i'm first just going to press shift c and pressing shift c will make sure that 3d cursor is in the very center of our scene and that is where i want to add the bones so i'm now going to press shift a and i'm going to go right down here to armature and then i want to click on a single bone now you may also see on my screen that there are some other rigs right here and that is because i've turned on blender's rigify add-on if you want to turn that on you can click on edit and you can go to the preferences and then right over here on the add-ons tab you can just go to the search here and you can start to type in rig and then you can see there is this rigging rigofy add-on so i just turned that on in the blender preferences we're not going to be using it in this tutorial but i just wanted to let you know about that if you wanted to turn it on and then we can just close the user preferences so with that add-on turned on now if you go to armature you can see there are some other basic rigs and these are rigs that are already created for different animals and we also have a human one i want to create my own custom rig so i'm going to click on single bone so i'm just going to click on single bone and now there's going to be a bone right here we can't see it but if i press g to grab and then click to place that you can see there's the bone now i want the bone to be in the very center so i'm going to press ctrl z to undo that because i want the bone to be in the center now i want to be able to see the bones through the mesh so what i'm going to do is click on this little stick figure right here and that is the object data properties of the bone and then i'm going to go right down here and open up the viewport display now on the viewport display you can click on in front and when you check mark that now you're going to be able to see the bones no matter what is in front of the bones so even if this mesh is in front of the bones you're still going to be able to see it so if i now press tab on the bones that it's going to go into edit mode on the armature so just like mesh objects have an edit mode and an object mode the bones have an edit mode and an object mode as well now if you click right up here you can see that the bones actually have three different modes so there's the normal object mode and that will allow you to select different objects and select the armature then you have edit mode and that will allow you to actually edit the armature and edit the bones and then when you want to do the animation you can go to the pose mode and so when you go to pose mode on the armature you can see when you select a bone it's going to be blue and you're going to use the pose mode for animating the bones i'm just going to click right here and i'm going to go back to object mode so if you press tab that is going to toggle between edit mode and object mode but if you want to go into pose mode you can press control tab when you're in object mode so just make sure the bone is selected in object mode and you can press control tab that is going to take you to the pose mode and then you can just press the tab key and that will toggle between pose mode and edit mode and then if you're in pose mode and you want to go back into the object mode you can press control tab again and that'll take you back to the object mode but if that all seems confusing don't worry about that you can just select the bone and then go right up here and change it to whichever mode you need so i'm just going to press tab and that will take us into edit mode of the bones and we're now going to edit the armature now there is just one more thing i want to do before we edit the bones i want to change the display type so if you go right over here to that little stick figure that is the object data properties of the bones you can go to the viewport display and i want to click on the display as and i'm going to change this to b bone now i personally just like b-bone better and why i like it better is because you can customize the size of each bone so you can just click on the top of the bone and press g to grab and that's going to change the size of the bone it's going to change where it is but if you select the entire bone you can press ctrl alt s and ctrl alt s will change the visual size of the bone but it's actually not going to change where the bone is placed so if you want to make some bones bigger you can just do that by pressing ctrl alt s and then you can bring your mouse down or control alt s bring your mouse up and then click so it's going to change the visual size of the bone without actually changing where the bone is placed and that is super useful so for instance in the final rig when we create the inverse kinematic bones so the bones that are going to control the arms and the legs we can make those bones bigger and then that way those bones will be easier to click on because they're bigger alright so i'm going to start by making the torso bones so i'm going to press 3 on the numpad and that is going to take me to the side view so i just want to click right here to select the top of the bone and i'm going to press g and g is going to grab the bone and i'm just going to bring it down here and then i'm going to click on this bottom one and also move it a little bit farther down let's press 1 on the numpad to go to the front view i can press g to grab and just bring it down a little bit so this is going to be the hip bone so when we move this bone it's going to move pretty much the entire character so i'm now just going to select the top of this and i'm going to press 3 again on the numpad 3 on the numpad that's going to take us to the side view and i think i'll just bring this slightly farther down so i now want to extrude this bone out and make another bone so with this selected this end part of the bone i'm going to press e and so e is going to extrude out the bone and this also makes a new bone so i'm just going to stick the bone right there and now you can see we have one bone and two bones so when you press e to extrude that will extrude out bones so i'm going to select this one again and i'm going to press e to extrude and we're going to bring this up and this one is going to go all the way up to the shoulders so we're going to have one bone for the hips another bone for the waist and then another bone going all the way up to the top of the chest and so in between these bones that is where it's going to rotate because if i press 1 on the numpad for front view you can see if i now click on edit mode and go right over here to pose mode i can select this bone and i can press r to rotate and you can see it's going to rotate from those joints so the bone is not going to rotate but where the end of the bone is that's where it's going to rotate so that's why we want to have three bones here a hip bone a waist bone and then a chest bone so let's click right back here on pose mode and i'm going to go back to the edit mode so i'm just going to select the top of the bone here and then i will press 3 on the numpad for the side view and let's just bring it down a little bit so i now want to press one on the numpad that's going to take me to the front view and i want to extrude some bones out here and then make the arm bones now what we're going to do is we're only going to rig half of the bone so we're going to rig this side and then we will tell blender to mirror it over to the other side and so we won't have to do as much work and it'll be done faster so i'm now going to press e to extrude that is going to extrude out another bone and also something to note is that when you extrude out bones this bone is going to be connected to the bone that it was extruded out of so now i'm just going to select the circle there and i'm going to bring this to right where i want the shoulder to rotate because again wherever these circles are where the bone ends that is where the next bone is going to rotate so you want to bring these bones to wherever the rotation is on the character so the shoulder is going to rotate kind of about here so i'm just going to stick it probably right about there so i'm now going to press e to extrude and i want to extrude this out again and i'm going to bring this right here to make like the elbow so that the arm can rotate and i'll just stick that right there let's also press 7 on the numpad and that is going to take us to the top view and you can see that's not in the center and i do want it to be in the center so i'm going to select this bone and i can press g to grab and then i want to bring it back so i'm going to hit y and y will constrain it to the y axis and i'll just bring that back all right let's select this bone again and i'm going to press e to extrude again and we're going to bring this all the way over here so this bone is going to go all the way over to kind of the starting of the wrist so i will now press one on the numpad to go to front view and i'll just bring this over a little bit farther so i now want to create another bone for the wrist and then i want to create two more bones one more for the palm and then one more for the fingers so i'm going to press e again to extrude this out and i'm going to just bring this one kind of over here to about there i also might select this one and just bring it forward a little bit okay just like that and then this is also where the thumb is going to come out but first let's press 7 on the numpad for top view let's press e again to extrude and we're going to extrude that out and then i can press 1 on the numpad for the front view and i'm going to press g to grab and just bring this up a little bit so it's just coming up a little bit then i can press e to extrude again and this is going to be the fingers you can also select the circle in there and you can press g to grab and just kind of move it over so now i want to zoom in here and kind of click on the center if you can't see it you can press 7 on the numpad and you can see it's still a bit hard to see that center one so what you can do is you can hold down the z key go over to the wireframe and then let go of the z key and then that way it's much easier to just select that circle right there and then i will hold down the z key go back to the solid view and let go so now that i've selected that circle in there i want to create two bones for the thumb so i'm going to press e to extrude we're just going to extrude that out and let's place that there and then i will press one on the numpad for front view and i can press g to grab and just move that down a little bit let's press 7 on the numpad again to go to the top view and i can now press e again to extrude that out and we'll just stick that right there and then again one on the numpad for the front view and i can press g to grab and i can hit z and that's going to bring it down on the z-axis now this is a stylized character and so this character just has a thumb and then kind of like a mitten hand so i'm just going to be using kind of one big finger for where the hand is but if you have a character with many fingers a more detailed character then you can just extrude out bones and you can make bones in the fingers and you can add as many joints as you need in those fingers now there's just one more bone that i'm going to be adding for the arm and that is going to be the ik bone the inverse kinematics bone so it's going to be the bone which is going to control the entire arm so what i want to do is i want to select this bone right here i now want to duplicate this bone so i'm going to press shift d to duplicate and then i'm just going to right click so it hops it back to the center there now this bone is right on top of the other bone so i want to scale this bone up so i'm going to press ctrl alt s and when you press ctrl alt s that is going to change the visual size of the bone but it actually won't change where the bone is placed so i'm just going to make this bone quite a bit bigger so it's just kind of like a square but now that bone is a lot bigger so it will be easier to click on now if i press g to grab you can see because we duplicated the bone by pressing shift d we duplicated the bone so it's actually not connected to the rig although you can see there is that little dotted line there and so that is telling us that the bone is parented to the other bone and it's parented to that bone because we duplicated it from the other bone so i'm just going to press escape to just bring that back there now i want to unparent it so that it is not connected to the other bone in any way so to unparent this i'm going to press alt p with the bone selected and then i want to click on clear parent so if i now press g to grab you can see that bone is fully disconnected and there isn't that little line there going down to the other bone all right so i'm now going to go back over here and i'm going to rig the neck and the head and then we will also do the leg so i'm just going to select the little circle right there and i'm gonna press three on the numpad to go to the side view so i'm now going to press e to extrude and i want to extrude this bone up until it's at the very bottom of the neck so somewhere like there i'll just click to place that then i want to extrude out another bone going from the bottom of the neck to the top of the neck so i'll press e again to extrude that up and i'll just stick that kind of right about there and then i can press e to extrude and we're going to make one more bone for the head now i want to bring this up very straight so i'm going to press z and that will bring it up on the z-axis and i'm just going to bring it to about there and then just click to place that all right so there we go so we now have the neck and the head so now we can go down here and we can make the leg bones so i'm just going to select this bone right here and i'm going to press one on the numpad to go to the front view so i now want to duplicate this bone and i want to put it right over here because right over here this is where the leg is going to rotate so i'm going to press shift d and shift d is the shortcut key to duplicate so it's going to duplicate whatever you have selected so i'm just going to duplicate that bone i'm going to place it there and then i can press 3 on the numpad to go to side view and i can press g to grab and r to rotate and i'm just going to fit that in the very center of the leg and i'm also going to select the top of this one and press g to grab and just move it up a little bit because again right here that is where the leg is going to rotate so you want to bring that to the very center of where the leg is going to rotate from the hips so i now want to select this circle right here at the end of that bone i'll press 3 again on the numpad that's going to go to the side view and i can press g to grab and i want to bring this all the way down and i want to stick it right there where the knee is and then also press 1 on the numpad for the front view press g to grab and just make sure it's right there in the center all right that's good so i'm now going to press e to extrude we're going to extrude this out again and i'm going to bring this all the way down to the ankle and then i can also press 3 on the numpad for the side view i can press g to grab and just kind of stick it right there and then i'll press e to extrude again we're going to extrude this bone down kind of about here and then i'll press e to extrude and i want to bring this bone out here now if you wanted to you could extrude out multiple bones in the feet and that way you could make more bones so that the foot can rotate and it would also make it look kind of like there are toe bones so the toes can rotate up and down but i'm not going to be doing that this is kind of a stylized character and it's more simple so i'm going to press g to grab and just bring this all the way over to the end just like that all right so just like we did right up here on the arm i want to create an ik bone so that we can use the inverse kinematics and that way we'll be able to select this bone and then we'll be able to press g to grab and just kind of move it around it's going to move the entire leg whereas if we weren't using the inverse kinematics we would have to select each bone and then rotate it individually so i actually want to select this bone and i want to duplicate it just like we did for the arm to make another bone for the ik so with this bone selected i'm going to press shift d to duplicate and then i'm going to right click so it brings it back to the center all right now i want to scale this bone up so i'm going to press ctrl alt s and again ctrl alt s is going to scale the visual size of the bone but it won't actually move where the bone is okay just like that now if i press g to grab you can see that there's still that line there and so that is telling us that the bone is parented to another bone but i want to unpair in it so i'm just going to press the escape key to bring that back there i'm going to press alt p with the bone selected and then i want to click on clear parent so if i press g to grab you can see that bone is not connected all right so we have almost added all the bones for this side i want to add one more bone in the very center which is going to control all of the bones so again i'm going to press shift c and shift c will make sure the 3d cursor is in the very center and then make sure you are still in edit mode of the armature so i'm now going to press shift a shift a is the shortcut key to add things it's going to bring up the add menu but because we are in edit mode we only can add bones we can only add bones in an armature so because we press shift a it automatically added a bone here so i'm going to select the bone and then i will press 3 on the numpad for side view and i can press g to grab and i want to bring this way down here now i want to rotate it over so i'm going to press r and r is going to rotate the bone and then i want to rotate it exactly over by 90 degrees so i can actually type in 9 0 and then enter and that will rotate it exactly over by 90 degrees so i can now press g to grab and i want to move this bone and just kind of stick it in the center i can press 1 on the numpad for the front view and that's already in the center so that is very good and it's already pretty big so i do like that if you want to you could press s to scale the bone down and then you can also press ctrl alt s and that is going to change the size of the bone so i do want it to be a bigger bone because we are going to be using it to move the entire character now i forgot to mention there are just two more bones that we need to add for the inverse kinematics rigging we need to add two more bones and those bones are going to tell the knee where it's going to be pointing and then we also need to add another bone to tell the elbow where it's going to be pointing so let's first do the elbow so i'm going to press 7 on the numpad for the top view and i'm going to select that elbow right there so i now want to extrude a bone out to add another bone right here so i'm going to press e to extrude and i'm going to bring this out and then i'm going to also hit y to bring it out on the y axis and i will just click to place it right there now i want this bone to be out here kind of in the 3d space so what i'm going to do is select the bone and then i'm going to press alt p so just hit alt p and then i want to click on clear parent and that way this bone is now going to be separate so i can press g to grab and i can just bring this bone out and then i want to hit y to bring it out on the y axis and i just want to stick this bone kind of about here so then later on in this video when we do the rigging this bone is going to control where the elbow is pointed so i want to do the same thing right down here for the knee so i'm going to press 3 on the numpad and that's going to take me to the side view and i'm just going to select this right here on the knee just select that circle there and then i want to press e and e is going to extrude out the bone and then i want to hit y to bring it over on the y axis and i'll just place it right there so i now want to select this bone and then again i want to clear the parent so that it is not connected to the armature so i'm going to press alt p and you can see these are grayed out if i just select this and press g to grab you can see it's already disconnected i don't know why that happened but the bone is already disconnected if it isn't just press alt p and make sure you click on clear parent so i can now press g to grab and i'm going to hit y to bring it over on the y axis and i'll just bring that out and then i'll also press s to scale that down a little bit and then also i'm going to press ctrl alt s and that'll just scale the bone up a little bit just to make it a little bit bigger and i'll do that for this one as well so i'm just going to select this bone up here and i'll press ctrl alt s and that is going to scale the bone and just make it a bit bigger all right so there we go so those are all of the bones that we're going to be adding for this side now we don't have the bones over on the right side but first what i'm going to do is rename all the bones and then we are going to actually tell blender to mirror over the bones so make sure you're saving your blender file by pressing ctrl s to save as you're working on the project just press ctrl s to save and that will save the blender file so let's rename all the bones now so i'm going to select the first bone right here and then i'm going to click right over here and this is going to take me to the bone properties now right up here you can see that we can rename the bone so i'm just going to click on this to rename it and i'm going to call this one head and then i want to click on the next bone right here and then this bone i'm going to call this one neck and then we kind of have a second neck bone so i'm going to click on this right here and i'm going to rename this to neck 2. you can really rename these to whatever you want um so you can just rename them to whatever makes sense for you i'm gonna now click on this bone right here and this one i'm going to rename to chest so just rename that to chest i'm gonna click on this one right here and this one i will click on the name here to rename it and i'm just going to rename this to a spine i'll press ctrl s again to save my blender file and then i will click on this one right here and this one i'm going to rename to hip and then also right down here i'm going to click on this bone right here and this one we're going to have control the entire armature so i'm gonna click on this bone right here and i'm gonna rename it to like main controller all right so i now want to rename all of the bones over on this side now there is one really important thing that i'll show you to renaming the bones over on the character's left side so i'm just going to click right here on this one and i'm going to rename this one to shoulder now you can rename these bones to whatever you want but what's really important is that after you rename it at the very end of the name you make a space so hit space and then you're going to type in capital l and enter so at the very end of the name of all of these bones on the character's left side you want it to have a space and then you want to have a capital l and blender is going to use that data to duplicate the bones over to the other side so this one i'm going to name shoulder l and then i'm going to click on this one right here this one i'm going to call upper arm and then i will make sure to have a capital l at the end and then let's click on this one right here this bone i'm going to rename to lower arm and then again a capital l at the end let's also click on this one right here and this one i'm going to rename this to elbow because it's going to control where the elbow is rotating so i'm going to call this elbow and then this is the inverse kinematics so i'm going to type in ik you don't have to do that if you don't want to but later on when i'm searching for the bones when i'm rigging the bones it'll be easy just to search for ik so i'm going to call this elbow ik and then i'm going to again type in capital l all right so capital l at the end let's click on this one right here and this one is going to be the inverse kinematics as well so this one is going to control the entire arm so this one i'm going to click on this and i'm going to call this arm and then i'm going to type in ik again just because this is one of the ik bones and then again at the very end make sure that you type in capital l and enter all right so that's good let's click right here actually i can't really click on the bone that's inside there so if i hold down the z button i can go to wireframe and then let go of the z button so i can now just click on this bone right here and this one i want to rename to wrist so i'm going to rename it to wrist and then again capital l at the end let's click on this one right here and this one i'm going to call this palm and then again a capital l at the very end and then let's click on this one right here and this one i'm going to rename two fingers capital l and then let's click on this one right here this one is going to be the thumb so i'm going to rename this one to thumb and then again capital l at the end let's click on the other thumb bone right there and then i'll click right here to rename the bone and this one i'm going to name to thumb two just because it's the second thumb bone and then again a capital l at the very end all right so those are all renamed now let's press ctrl s again to save and let's go down here and rename these bones so i'm going to click on this bone right here i'm going to call this upper leg and then again very important make sure you have a capital l at the very end let's click on the next bone right here and this one i'm going to call this lower leg and then again a capital l at the very end let's navigate right down here and i'm going to click on this one right here that one right there in the very center and i'm going to rename this one to ankle and then again a capital l at the very end all right and then let's click on this bone right here and i'm going to rename this one to a leg because this big bone right here that is going to control the leg and then this is the ik bone so i'm going to type in i k just so that i can remember that it's ik and when i'm searching for the bone later on when we're raking it it'll be easy to find so leg ik and then a capital l again all right and then let's click on this one right here and this one i'm going to rename to foot and then capital l all right there we go let's press ctrl s again to save now before we mirror these over i want to set up the ik rigging and that way we won't have to set it for the other side and it'll already be set up when it gets mirrored over so let's do that so to set up the inverse kinematics i actually want to click on edit mode and i want to change this to the pose mode and so in the pose mode we are going to be setting up the ik rigging and then let me just hold down the z button go to solid view and let go now if you didn't have this set up and you wanted to move the arm you would have to select this arm and press r to rotate and then select this arm and press r to rotate and you'd have to keep on selecting bones and then rotating them over but with the ik rigging with the inverse kinematics you'll just be able to select this bone press g to grab and you can bring that up and it's going to move all of the bones for the arm so i'm going to show you how to set that up now i want to bring the bones back to their default pose so i'm just going to double tap the a key to select all the bones and i'm going to press alt g that will clear any grab and then alt r that will clear any rotation all right so i'm now going to go right over here and i'm going to hold down the z button and i'm going to go to wireframe and then let go so i now want to select this bone right here so this is the small bone which is inside of the larger bone so i'm now going to click right over here and we're going to go to the bone constraint properties so i want to add the inverse kinematics so we're going to click on add bone constraint and i'm going to go right here and under tracking i'm going to add the inverse kinematics or for short ik all right so now there's some different settings here that we need to change now it might look a little bit complicated but once you know how to use everything it's actually quite easy and i'll walk you through the entire process so the first thing that we need to choose is the target now the target is really just this armature so if i open up the collection right here if i open this up we have this armature and this is just the armature object so it's the entire armature so if i click on this bone right here this one has the ik for the target we just need to select the armature and that is telling it that it's going to use this armature so now i need to tell this bone what bone is going to move so i want this bone to be controlled by this bone so i'm going to click back on this one and i'm going to click on the bone so now in this bone section i can start to type in ik and you can see that it's just going to show us all the bones that have the ik in them and so i want to select the arm ik because that is what i renamed that bone now if you don't remember what you renamed it you can just click on this bone right here and right up here you can see i renamed it to arm ik and then left so i'm going to click back on this one here click on the bone and i can just start to type in ik and i want to click on the arm ik left now when i do that you can see that it kind of moves over and that is because it is using the tail so basically it's moving this bone over here because it's moving it to the starting of this bone and the starting of this bone is kind of right over here now if i select this bone and press g to grab you can see it is working so i'm just going to press escape to undo that but i want this bone to be back to its default position so i'm going to click on this bone right here and this is yellow and that is because it has the ik on it so right over here i just want to turn off the use tail and when i turn that off now you can see it goes back to its default position which is right in the center there so i can now just select the ik bone the arm controller bone and i can press g to grab and you can see it's working and that is really cool so now instead of individually moving each one of these bones i can just select this one and it's going to move the whole thing now there is a problem and that is that this bone is moving the entire armature and instead i just want it to move all the bones up to right here so i want to click back on the yellow bone so just click on the yellow bone and that is the one with the ik and what i want to do is change the chain length so right now the chain length is turned to zero and when it's turned to zero it's just going to use all of the bones which are connected down the chain of bones but instead i just wanted to use these bones here on the arm so i'm first going to change the chain length to one and now if i click on this and move it you can see it's just going to move the bones after it and then it's just going to move one bone before it but i want to click back on this one actually click on the yellow one i want to change this to two and now this is set to two you can see that little dotted line there it's going to go to the end of this one because there are two bones here so now if i select this one and press g to grab you can see that is working correctly and so it's just moving the arm and that is exactly what i want now there are two more things that i want to do to be able to control the arm better so the first thing that i want to do is i want to be able to rotate this bone and i want this bone to rotate the wrist and the hand because i don't want to have to select another bone then rotate the hand and then select this bone again and move it i just want to be able to rotate this bone and have it rotate the wrist and then the other thing that i want to do is i want to have some sort of control to rotate where the elbow is pointing because i could just select this and kind of rotate it but i don't have the best control and so it would be a lot easier just to select this bone and then grab it and kind of move it around and then it will change the rotation of the elbow so let's do that so the first thing i'm going to do is just make this affect the rotation of the wrist so i want to bring these all back to their default location so i'm going to double tap the a key to select all the bones so i now want to press alt r and alt r is going to clear the rotation of any bones and then if you press alt g that is going to clear any grabs or any movements of the bones so he is now back to his default t-pose so i'm just going to click back on the yellow bone where the ik is so to make the elbow control i'm going to be using the pull target so the first thing that we want to do is click right here and again we just want to click on the armature because that is the armature of this entire bone object now the second one here this is going to be the bone that's going to control the elbow and so that is this bone right here so if i click on this i can start to type in ik and then you can see here is the elbow ik and then l for left so i'm going to click on that now again if you don't remember what you renamed it you can just click on this one right here and you can see the name right there and then you can just click back on the yellow bone and then add that bone right there so it's the elbow ik left now when we added that you might have noticed something and that is that the arm kind of got rotated over you can see this hand is kind of rotated over as well and that's because you need to change the pull angle so you just need to change the pull angle back so that it is back to the default position so you can just rotate this around by changing the pull angle and usually you're just going to have to change this by a value of 90. so i can just change this to a 90. so on the pull angle i can type in 90 and then hit enter but you can see that actually rotated it the wrong way around so instead of changing it to a 90 i'm just going to click on this and i'm going to instead type in negative 90. so it's going to rotate it over by 90 degrees but it's going to rotate it on the opposite direction so negative 90 and you can see now that arm is rotated back to the right position now if you go to side view and kind of look at the thumb you can see there still is a problem that's still rotated over a little bit it's not quite rotated all the way up so i can just manually change this just by clicking and dragging on the pull angle and i'm just going to rotate that up just so that that is now right there inside the thumb so negative 100 was the value for me but you're just going to need to change it to the value that works best for you so it's back to its right position so now i can select this bone right here i can press g to grab and i can move that up and then i can select this bone right here and i can press g to grab and when i rotate that you can see it's going to rotate where the elbow is pointing so that is very cool now for the last thing that i want to do i just want to be able to rotate this and have it rotate the wrist so i'm going to double tap the a key again to select everything and let's press alt r and alt g to clear the bone's rotation and movement so i'm now going to select the yellow bone again and so on the yellow bone i actually want to add another bone constraint so i'm going to click on add bone constraint and i'm going to go right down here and add the copy rotation so it's under transform copy rotation so with this copy rotation constraint we can tell this bone to copy the rotation of another bone so let's click on the target and again for the target we just want it to be the armature because that is the object of these bones now for the bone i want to select this bone right here so if i click on this i can type in ik and you can see the one that we want to add is the arm ikl and again if you can't remember the name just select that bone and you can see what it's called alright so that is going to now copy the rotation of this bone so if i now select this bone if i rotate it this bone is going to copy the rotation of this bone so i can press r to rotate now and you can see that it's going to rotate the hand and the wrist and that is it for the finished arm rig now the actual character's arm isn't moving with the bones yet but we will be doing that in a moment but first we need to finish the leg rigging and then we also need to mirror the bones over so let's double tap the a key to select everything and i'm going to press alt r again and alt g so alt r and alt g will bring it back to its default position and also if for some reason you've scaled the bones with everything selected you can press alt s and that will clear any scale alright so we are going to do a very similar thing for the legs so what i'm going to do is navigate right down here and i want to select this bone right here so it's the ankle left let's also press ctrl s again to save so now over here on the bone constraints i want to add a bone constraint to that bone so let's click on add bone constraint and again i want to add the inverse kinematics or ik so now we need to set this up again so let's click on the target and again the target is just going to be the armature so the armature for all the bones so you can just click on armature or whatever you've renamed the armature to and then on the bone here we want to click on this and i want to type in i k again just to search for it and this one we want to be the leg ik so we want to select this bone right here so if you don't remember what it's called you can just select that one and you can see it's renamed to leg ikl so let's select this one again and you can see that it's bringing it to the starting of the bone and that is because it is using the tail but we don't want it to use the tail and now that we unchecked the used tail it's back to the center so i can now select this bone and i can press g to grab and you can see it's moving but you can see it's only going up this far and i want it to move the entire leg so let's click right back over here click on the yellow bone and i want to change the chain length so let's change the chain length all the way up to two because i want to move these two bones now if i select the main leg controller bone and press g to grab you can see it's still not working correctly and this is because of how i added these leg bones it's not seeing this bone as being the very top of these bones and you can also see if i select this bone and press g to grab you can see these bones are actually not connected so i'm just going to fix this real quick in the edit mode so i'm just going to click right here on pose mode and i'm just going to change this over to edit mode so if this problem is happening for you you can just do what i'm about to do right here so now in edit mode i'm going to select this bone you can see it's actually not connected to the other bones so i'm going to press x to delete and i want to delete the bones now i want this to be the very top of all the leg bones so i'm going to select this circle right here and i'm going to press 3 on the numpad to go to the side view i'm now going to press g to grab and i'm going to bring this bone all the way up to the very top and then i will press 1 on the numpad to go to the front view and i'm just going to bring this bone over so this bone needs to be right where the leg is going to rotate so i now want to subdivide this bone so that there are actually two bones so i want to split this bone into two bones so using the object context menu in edit mode you can click on subdivide so i use the right click select so i hit the w key for the object context menu but you can just right click and then you can click on subdivide and now you can see that it subdivided the bones so there are now two bones so i'm now going to click on this circle right here and i'll press g to grab and i'm going to stick this down here so i'm going to press 3 on the numpad that's going to take me to the side view and i can press g to grab and i'm going to stick this over kind of here in the center of where the knee is and then this one right here this one needs to be right where the leg is going to rotate so just make sure you've put that where you want and then i just need to make sure these are named correctly so just click on the bones and let's go to the bone properties now you can see because i duplicated the bones it renamed them incorrectly so i just need to rename them so i'm going to click on this bone right up here and i want to rename this one to upper leg so upper leg so this one is going to be called upper leg and then capital l because it is the left side so i'm now going to click on this one right here and this one i want to rename to lower leg capital l so we have upper leg and lower leg alright so now that that is fixed let's click on edit mode we're going to go back to the pose mode and you can now just select the main controller for the leg and you can press g to grab and you can see it's going to work properly now again just like the arm i want to be able to control where that joint is rotating or where it's pointing so i'm going to click right back over here on the yellow bone and that bone has the object constraint so if you click right over here on the bone constraints you can see this one has the inverse kinematics so now i just need to add the pull target so for the pull target i'm first going to choose the armature because the armature is all of the bones the bone object and then for the bone i want to click on this and i want to type in ik to search for the ik bones and you can see in the drop down it's not showing up and that is because i actually didn't rename this bone so i'm going to click on this bone and then i just want to go right over here to the bone properties and this bone i want to rename to knee and then it is an ik bone so i'm going to type in ik and then again we need to change it to capital l because it is on the left side of the character so let's click right back over here on the yellow bone let's go back over here to the bone constraints and then right here on the bone i can type in ik to search for the bone and i want to add the knee ik so now you can select this bone and you can press g to grab and it's going to change the rotation of where the knee is now when we were rigging the arm you may remember that we needed to change the pull angle because the rotations of the bone was incorrect and so you may need to do that with the leg so if i double tap the a key i can press alt r that will clear the rotation and alt g that will clear the movement and so if the leg is rotated over maybe the leg is rotated out here or maybe the foot is kind of rotated over here you can just select the yellow bone and then you can change the poll angle so again usually you're just going to type in 90 or you might also need to type in negative 90. for me it is a value of zero you can see it's pointed in the right direction but you just might need to play around with that pull angle rotation and then just like we did for the arm i want this bone to be able to rotate the rotation of the foot so i'm going to click right back over here on the yellow bone this bone has the constraints and i want this bone's rotation to be controlled by the other bone so let's click on add bone constraint and i want to go right down here and copy the rotation now if i scroll down here you can see here's the copy rotation so i need to choose the target so i'm going to click on this and again i want to choose the armature because that is all the bones and then for the bone here i can type in ik and i want to choose the leg ikl because that bone is this bone right here so if you don't remember what it's called you can click on it and you can see the name and so now if i click on this bone i can rotate it and you can see it's going to rotate the foot and so that way we don't have to select the other bone and then rotate it we can just rotate this bone it's going to rotate the foot all right now there is another thing that i want to do if i select the hip bone if i press g to grab to move the hip you can see it is moving all the top of the character but because these bones are disconnected it's not actually moving the legs with the hip and so i want to parent this bone to the hip bone so that when the hip bone moves this bone will move so let's just click on pose mode and i'm going to go back to edit mode so i'm going to select this bone and then i'm going to hold down the shift key and select the hip bone so i now want to press ctrl p and ctrl p is the shortcut key to parent bones now i want to keep the offset because if i change it to connected then these two bones are going to be connected together but i want to keep the offset because i want this bone to be down here so again i'm going to press ctrl p and i want to keep the offset and when i do that now you can see they are parented because there is that little line there so if i now click on edit mode and go back to pose mode i can select this and i can press g to grab and you can see that it's going to move the arm and the legs so i'm going to double tap the a key to make sure all the bones are selected and then again you can press alt r and alt g and alt s to clear all the values now there's one more thing that i want to do i want this bone to be able to control all the bones so what i'm going to do is select the hip bone and then i'm going to hold down the shift key and i'm going to select all the ik bones so this one here also this ik bone here and then also right up here i want to hold down the shift key and select this one and then also this one so if i press g to grab you can see that these bones are moving all of the other bones so i want all of these bones to be parented to the main controller so i'm going to hold down the shift key and then select the main controller last and then i'm going to click on pose mode and i'm going to go to edit mode now it is really important that this bone is selected last because this one is going to be the parent and then all the other bones are going to be the child of the parent so when i move this bone it's going to move the other bones and you can know that this is the last one that's selected because it has a yellow outline where the other ones have an orange outline and then make sure you're doing this in edit mode so in edit mode i'm going to press ctrl p and i want to keep the offset because if i change it to connected all the bones are going to move to the last bone so i want to keep the offset but make the parent so i can now click on edit mode and i can go back to pose mode and i can now select this bone and if i press g to grab all the bones are going to move along with it i can also rotate this and scale it and all the bones are going to move along with it and then one more thing i want to do just to customize this a little bit better i'm going to click on pose mode and i'm going to go back to edit mode and then if i select the hip bone i can press ctrl alt s and that'll change the visual scale of it but it won't actually change how big it is so i'll just make that a little bit bigger by pressing ctrl alt s and then let's click on edit mode and we can go back to the pose mode alright so we are almost ready to duplicate the bones over to the other side but there is something that i want to do to these bones here these bones i don't want them to actually control the mesh i just want these bones to control the bones but then these other bones are going to actually control the mesh so what we're going to do is we're just going to select one of these bones and then you're going to click right over here on the bone properties and we want to uncheck the d form so now that the d form is turned off when we parent the mesh to the bones because the d form is turned off on this bone this bone is not going to control any of the mesh so i just want to do that for the other ik bones so i'm going to click on this one turn off deform let's also click on this one down here and we will turn off the deform and then click on this one here and deform and also this one right here this isn't going to move any of the mesh this is just going to move the bones which are then going to move the mesh so for this one here i also want to turn off the deform but for all the other bones inside the legs and the body and the neck and the head and the arms i want to just leave the d form turned on all right so we can now mirror the bones over to the other side so what i'm going to do is click on pose mode and i'm going to go back to edit mode so what i want to do is i want to select all the bones on this side so i'm going to press b and that's going to bring up the box select and i'm just going to box select all these bones and then press b again for the box select select all these bones and then i will just hold down the shift key and shift select these bones right here so all the bones over on this side on the left side of the character need to be selected and also as i talked about earlier it's really important that all the bones end with the capital l so if you weren't quite sure about the naming just go back and click on all the bones on this side and make sure they end with a capital l in the name so just make sure all of the bones on the left side of the character are selected so to mirror them over to the other side you're going to click on armature and you're going to go right down here and click on the symmetrize button and when you do that it's going to mirror them over to the other side and if you select these bones you can see that blender has renamed them now to r because this side is the right side of the character so because we had these named with a capital l at the end blender could recognize that those were on the left side so it renamed these to the right side and the cemeteries worked so now if i click on edit mode and go back to pose mode you can just select the bones and make sure everything is working properly and there is a chance that this might be at the wrong rotation so if that is happening then you can just select the yellow bone right here and then you can go back over to the bone constraint properties and then right over here on the pull angle you can just change the pull angle so if you need to you can change that but for me that worked fine and also right down here there's a possibility that it might be the wrong direction so if you need to you can change that pull angle to the correct angle but you can see my knee is going forward so i don't need to change the pull angle all right so you can just select the bones just make sure everything is working properly so that's rotating properly this can move up and then also these ones here those are going to rotate the knees and then i can select this middle one in here and i can move that one and if i move this one here that's going to select the entire thing but it's not going to move the ik bones and also i can select this one here and that's going to move all the bones all right so everything is working properly so i'm just going to double tap the a key to select all the bones and make sure you're in pose mode you can press alt r that will clear any rotations alt g to clear any locations and alt s to clear any scales so it's now back to the default position all right so we are now ready to actually rig the mesh to the bones so let's click on pose mode and we're going to go back to object node and then i'm going to hold down the z button go back to the solid view and let go so i'm going to now select the mesh and then i'm going to hold down the shift key and lastly select the armature so i now want to press ctrl p and that's going to bring up the parent settings and we selected the bones last so it's going to show us some parenting bone settings so i want to click on with automatic weights so when you choose with automatic weights it's going to detect where the mesh is around the bones and then as best as it can it's going to rig the mesh to those bones which are nearby so just click on with automatic weights so i can now just select the armature and then let's click on object mode you can go to pose mode you can also just press control tab and then you can select the bones and move them around and see how the character is looking so that is very cool that arm is looking really good i can move this as well move that around i can also select the neck that looks cool and i can rotate the head that's pretty cool as well and then i can select this bone so just select the different bones and press g to grab you can just kind of move them around and see how everything is working that's really cool i'm just going to like make him in a running pose just to kind of test out the bones and see how that's looking so i can kind of rotate this up and kind of rotate his foot down and then i can also grab this leg i'll press g to grab kind of bring that up and then i need to select this bone right here and press g to grab and kind of move this up and that's going to tell it where the knee is going to be pointing kind of rotate that down as well i could also select the foot bones and just kind of rotate those that's looking good so i now want to show you how you can manually edit the weight painting for each bone so if you select this bone this top bone here i can press r to rotate and you can see as i'm rotating this it's kind of stretching the jaw out and there also is a little bit of pinching here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to edit the weight painting of the bone and so i'm going to edit how much of the mesh the bone pulls along so to change this i'm going to click on pose mode and i'm going to go back to object mode and then in object mode i'm going to select the bones and then i'm going to hold down the shift key and select the mesh last so i can now click on object mode and i want to change this to the weight painting so now i am in the weight painting mode and so now i can select different bones by just clicking and selecting so use whichever mouse button you use to select i use the right click select but on default it is the left click so just left click and select the different bones and when you select the different bones it's going to show you the weight painting of the bone and so this is a visual representation of how much of the mesh the bones are going to pull along so you can see if i select the head bone and then rotate that you can see that where the mesh is red that means it's going to rotate all of that part of the mesh but then as the mesh gets more and more blue colored it's going to pull along less of that bone so this head bone obviously doesn't move the rest of the mesh if i select the head bone press r to rotate it doesn't move the rest of the mesh it only rotates the head but then you can see kind of right here where it's kind of a light blue or a green it kind of rotates it a little bit but not that much you can see it's kind of being stretched but then over here on the red area it's moving all of it and then if you select different bones that's going to show you how much of it is moving so what we can do is we can actually paint on the weight paint for each bone and we can change how much of the mesh the bone is going to pull along so i'm going to use the head as an example so i'm going to select the head bone and then right up here you can see there are some different brushes and these are the different brush settings so right up here if you click on this you can see it says draw and you could also change it to add and that is going to make the values more red but then if you want to make it less you could also change it to subtract so i'm going to change it to add because i want to add more of the red color so that this bone will pull along more of the head so now that i've changed that there are a few more things that i want to do i also want to turn on the symmetry so i'm going to click on this x button right here and that way whatever i do on one side of the character it's also going to do it on the other side and then you can also change the radius and strength so i can just click on this and drag the radius out you can also press the f key and the f key is going to change the size of the brush so you can press f make it bigger or smaller and then click to place it and then you can also change the strength right here and the shortcut key to change the strength is shift f so i'm going to make the strength a bit less so that it's not quite as strong and so when i rotate this head bone i want the chin to go along with it so i'm now just going to start to click and i'm going to just kind of add some more values there i'm just going to add more of that and you might also notice that as i make this more red the head is actually kind of slowly moving up to meet that or the chin is moving up because we are turning up the value so i want all of this area here to be fully moving along with the bone so i'm just going to drag just click and drag and kind of paint that and now if i rotate this you can see that that is moving much more with that head bone and for instance if i just painted some of the shoulder and then rotated the head bone you can see that now that that's been painted a little bit the shoulders are actually moving with the head but of course i don't want that so let's subtract that so to subtract it i'm going to click on the add click right here and i'm going to instead go to subtract and then i can just start to paint here and you can see it's going to get rid of that so i'm going to get rid of that and because we have the mirror turned on it did it for both sides so now i can just rotate that and you can see that is working correctly so you can now just select each bone and you can change the weight painting if you need to and also if you select these bones you can see that the mesh turns pink and that is because we turned the deform off on these bones because remember we don't want these bones to actually pull along the mesh we want these bones to control the other bones and then those bones are pulling along the mesh all right so that is the basics of weight painting after you've rigged your character so i'm just going to click on the weight painting and i'm going to go back to the object mode i can press a to deselect everything and then i want to select just the armature again and then let's press ctrl tab and that's going to take me to the edit mode so i can just double tap the a key to select everything and i can press alt r and alt g and alt s to bring it back to the default position and i can click on pose mode and go back to object mode so i'll just press ctrl s again to save and this is going to wrap it up for this beginner tutorial on how to do rigging in blender so i hope you found this tutorial helpful i hope you are able to easily follow along and thank you so much for watching and if you'd like to help support me and my youtube channel then some great places to do that are on my gumroad store and my patreon page and on my gumroad store and patreon page you can get the tutorial files for this tutorial as well as my other tutorials and you can also get 3d models and assets and procedural materials and other blender content on my gummered and patreon and that's a great way to help support me and this channel so that's it for this tutorial so i hope you found the video helpful and thank you for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 148,904

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, rigging, rigging for beginners, rigging in Blender, character rigging, blender rigging tutorial, ik rigging, inverse kinematics

Id: mYgznqvbisM

Length: 52min 59sec (3179 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022