Character Rigging in Blender 04a - Creating a Simple FK Spine Rig

g'day everyone ditko here with another kick ass walkthrough this is part four of a multi-part series that covers character rigging in this video i'm going to show you the process of creating a very basic fk driven rig so what does that mean well it's a basic rig that has some hip controls as you can see here and a basic joint chain or control chain that controls the upper torso very simple stuff and uh every basic rig has this so um as we go forward into creating more complex spine rigs you'll also need to know the very fundamentals which would be to make something as simple as this rig here so if you were to make a very simple character rig this is all you kind of need but if you choose to go with something more advanced and you want stretch controls and you want uh twist controls all that sort of fancy then uh the next video which will be um part four b will cover bendy bone spine rigs and then if you want even more control we will get into the ultimate spine rig which will be part 4c and that will involve a spline ik rig so for those who are just looking to make a very simple control rig and you can easily animate with this by the way you can easily do whatever you need to do with your character with this setup just with a little less finesse [Music] you can still create some amazing animation with this rig setup so what i've created here is essentially a global control that will control the entire character we've got our center of gravity control which will cover cover the uh well the center of gravity as you can see the arms and the legs are moving at the moment because we don't have those rigged up yet and then we have the hips down that sort of hierarchy that control you know the bottom half of the body essentially and then we have the upper body which will control the you know spine essentially so let's jump into it from scratch all right cool so we got our um set up here very simple sort of uh joint setup it's all manipulating quite well very cool all right so what can we do to make this uh thing a lot more easier to control what we're gonna do is basically create three joints well actually four joints to uh set up this entire thing so first thing i need to do is create a global control joint that will uh act as our global manipulator for our upper body like a center of gravity we need to create a hip control and then we have to create a fk joint chain uh that will work as our um manipulator for the spine so first thing i want to do is select everything and i want to except for the uh the bottom control there and i want to move it to the last layer so push m on your keyboard to bring that up let me just bring up my um screencast keys you want to push m on your keyboard and move it to the end there so i want to make sure that all my deformed joints are on a separate uh armature layer in the um the armature settings that will allow me to understand that anything that's not in that little layer there anything that's not in this layer here at the end is a mechanical joint or a control joint okay so eventually we'll have a pretty nicely organized layer system for our armature set up here okay the next thing i want to do is create a joint or a bone that will act as our global control and as our hip control so we have two bones in the same location so if i grab this joint here this is kind of where i want my hip to pivot from um the hips i want to create a two joints or two bones from this point onwards so i'm gonna select this part of our bone chain and push shift s cursor to selected and i'm going to create firstly one new bone i'm going to scale that down using individual origins and local transforms all right and i'm going to call it in the bone settings i'm going to call it control cog so center of gravity and i'm going to turn off it uh the functionality for the form so i don't want this to be deforming at all if i ever have to do a new weight paint okay or automatic weights so i want to turn that off from the get-go always make sure that when you're working with mechanical bones or control bones that you always straight away as soon as you make them you turn off the form because you're going to end up with a lot of issues if you don't okay the second thing i need to do is make another one so i'm going to duplicate that one and i'm going to probably scale that down a little bit and i'm going to call that control hips dot zero zero one okay i'll make sure this one's called control cog.001 because i'd like to keep things numbered and in the armature view make sure that you got um in the viewport settings i want to turn off uh shading i want to make it display as wire so it's easier to click on things okay so straight off the bat i want to make this hip control a child of my cog ctrl p keep offset and then i want to make this um cag control a child of that global control at the bottom there okay so let's move these guys to the first layer at the start so m to move and we've moved them to the appropriate layer and i want to get this cog control to be a child of this global control so control p keep offset okay cool to bring back the view about the form rig we can just push shift and click in the armature viewport settings there okay so to recap and reiterate what i'm doing here let's just demonstrate so right now the deform rig hasn't been attached at all to our controls all i'm doing is setting up the hierarchy for what will become the control rig so right now we have a global bone that's controlling both the cog and the hips and then we have the cog that can control the hips but not the entire rig and then we have the hip control doing its own thing on its own okay so that's how the hierarchy is at the moment so eventually we will link everything up but first we need to create i would say three more bones that will represent our fk joint chain going up the spine okay so let's go back into edit mode and i'm going to duplicate the hip bone or the hip control sorry the hip control and keep it in the exact same spot i'm going to scale that down because this bone or this uh what will become the um control underscore fk spa what's called torso 1.001 will control the the joint chain going up the spine whereas the hips will control the joint chain going down the spine okay as in underneath below that pivot point okay so we got that bone we're going to keep it in the exact same spot don't worry about it right now we're going to now duplicate this guy duplicate torso.001 and if we look at the um the joint chain i want it to sit on the next stage of our spine so this is where our hips are pivoting from the next stage in our spine is here so i want it to sit on that spinal part there so i'm going to go shift s selection to cursor i'm going to scale that up so it's a bit easier to see so now torso.002 will control the spine going from here upwards okay all right one more duplication of that so duplicate that bone one more time and in this case we can either call it torso zero zero three or i can call it chest zero zero one it's up to you i think i'll just call it torso zero zero three to make life easier for me so let's look at that but that uh joint set setup there again we want it to pivot from this area from the the upper side of this uh chest area so i'm gonna move my 3d cursor to here so shift s selection to cursor to select it bring back my um my fk torso.003 and go cursor to selected oops sorry selection to cursor my bad [Music] selection to cursor all right so this is what we have at the moment i'm going to hide the deform rig just to reiterate what we're doing [Music] so what we got is at the moment we have the control cog which is the parent of the hips okay the hips are these guys all right now the hips will be separate from the spine rig okay so what we're going to do with uh control fktorso.001 is we're going to make it a child of the cog and i'll explain why that's happening now so it's already a child of that that's good so what we can do now is make the control fk torso.002 a child of torso zero zero one and this is why it's important to again make layers so what we're gonna do i'm going to uh temporarily hide the cog control and the hips control i'm gonna select all my fk controls bones and move them to another layer so it's easier to select and what i'm going to do is basically create the joint chain for that i'm going to link all these up okay so what we're going to do i know that this is at the right pivot points along the chain at the base so i need to move the uh the tail of these controls down so they kind of fit together and it looks it'll all come together soon don't you worry so i'm going to go here and press cursor to selected and move the cursor there grab the tail of the fk001 and make it selection to cursor so i'm just going to link them all up so there's a nice clean set up there section to curse at the base sorry cursor to select it at the base of our chest there and selection to cursor there so now we have a clean control set up there for our spine and i'm going to go and make uh set up the hierarchy of this now so the chest control will be a child of the torso zero zero two uh torso zero two two will be a child of the fk zero zero one keep offset i'm keeping offset for now because i don't really want them to be connected that's okay you can have it connected if you want it's not a big deal all right and then i'm going to go back to my layers and unhide that setup there so what we have now is a right now we have a control setup like so global control is moving everything okay cog is moving at the moment just the hips oh it's moving everything including the spine sorry the hips and the spine okay the hips are moving independently from the spine okay [Music] the spine controls are now working like an fk chain like so and if i were to move the cog it would all move together okay cool that's the basic setup we're done with the basic setup for our control setup here so now it's about setting up our constraints and the parenting for our hip set up hip and spine setup okay so what we need to do is make these two uh controls or two two um deform joints to be manipulated by the hips essentially because what's going to happen is the hips will control downwards from that pivot point so pretty simple thing to do we're just going to grab the um these two joints here and make him a child of these hips of this hip control and then from here on in from the top up we're going to make uh these uh joints i child or even constrain them to the uh the spine controls so what we need to do is go to our deform set up here available to us to select we're going to select these two joints select our hips and push control p make parent keep offset all right let's go into pose mode and test that out so now the control hips.001 should control the bottom of the hips and you can see here that because we haven't set up the actual um pelvis joints to be a child of our spine it's not manipulating but if we do that now so let's grab these two pelvis joints make them a child of the hips down there you can see it's now manipulating as you'd expect with that hippie action okay all right cool so that's the hips done the hips are done that is that simple even though it doesn't sound that simple when i talk about it so the hips are done now it's up to us to work through the spine so now we can actually hide the um the cog and the hips in that layer so we're just going to bring back our spine set up there and bring back our deform uh joints there so it's a bit hard to see that they're actually overlapping you've seen the labels there they're actually overlapping which is a real pain but all we need to know is that once we click on the control fk and then we can click on control on the def spine002 we've got the right sl the right um order of our selection so what we want to do we want to constrain the um the deformed spine to the um control fk all right so again select control fk then can select deform spine.002 ctrl shift c copy transforms boom okay let's do the same thing again up the chain i'm going to select the ctrl fk torso.002 then shift select the deform spine copy transforms boom and finally again one more ctrl fk torso 0 0 3 select the spine copy transforms done all right now let's see what happens when we hide the deform rig let's hide let's hide the deform set up here and just bring back all our controls so far all right we have our global control manipulates everything our cog it will appear that we're controlling everything is only controlling the torso okay it's doing its thing that's supposed to happen all right let's select the hips it's manipulating the hips nice now let's have a look at the torso fk torso so the fk torso is only manipulating the upper body down the chain just like that sweet perfect another thing to be aware of is make sure that your joint orientations are always matching your deform rig so in this case we're pretty good everything's facing the right direction z is forward on up the chain so that's good to know but that's the basic setup all done so all we need to do now is add some actual control shapes to uh make this less confusing and more manageable so um let's do that now okay starting with the global control let's make a very simple um control for that all right let's go into object mode and we're going to make a new shape any old mesh we're going to choose a circle let's just bring that back down to ground there and what i like to do with uh most of my controls i want to add a line down the center with a little arrow to show which direction the main point of access is so in this case i want it to um say that you know forward facing this is the control so i'm going to go into edit mode i'm going to fill in a edge down there i'm going to extrude out a line and then i'm going to do the same thing on this side extrude out on the x extrude out on the x in the opposite direction there and i'm basically making a sort of arrow i'm not being very accurate here but i can if i want to i can actually hold down control and sort of snap it to um the grid let's actually do that let's add grid snapping absolute good snap and just snap everything there make it nice and clean there we go add the arrow shape there we go done so that's our control uh setup for that i'm going to name that rename that widget global control and i'm gonna move that into its own collection new collection widgets okay let's go to uh pose mode and we're going to make this um control the bone shape for this control so let's go to um viewport display custom shape and we're going to just pick that and we're good to go awesome and you can always scale that down to uh fit you know sort of you know it's going to be there about the right size that way all right cool so that controls up we can actually now select that as a you know controller in pose mode so you can see you can actually control the setup like that which is cool let's do the same thing for the rest of our joints here so i'm going to make a new shape for our our cog so i'm going to make a plane in this case i'm going to remove the uh the face only faces and i'm just going to live with the um the setup there let's select the entire edges and i'm going to subdivide that so i can actually have enough geometry to add a line down the center and in the top view i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to extrude out a line with an arrow like so so i i know exactly what's going on there and for some reason it snapped up on the grid a bit higher so let's uh fix that scale zero done all right cool all right let's grab the uh the cog control and pick the um the cig shape let's firstly rename that f2 widget cog all right cool and you'll see i have an option a problem here the uh the shape is going in the wrong direction so i talked about this in my previous rigging series but that's basically due to the orientation of the joints or orientation of the bone versus the orientation of our um our shape here so all we need to do is basically firstly i'm going to rotate this to sort of suit the orientation of our setup here in object mode not in local mode object mode just to line it up a little bit just to make it a little bit easier to uh you know see how things are going to be shaped i'm then going to go into edit mode and then rotate in the x to make sure it fits appropriately oops turn off snapping so there's our global control there's our um our cog control up and running and i mean back in in i'm back in object mode just setting up the uh scale just a little bit just to make sure it's sort of yeah when i look at it organizationally wise it fits okay move that to the widget control we don't need that anymore we can hide it and there we go there's our global control oh cag control working its magic perfect okay let's get the hip control up and running [Music] let's grab another circle actually i'm going to duplicate the um the widget control for the glo for this global i'm going to duplicate that and i'm going to rename that as widget hips [Music] and i'm just going to give it a little bit of a change in the shape so i'm going to give it a sort of hip like shape so i'm going to select everything there scale a little bit like so and then using soft select i'm going to give it a sort of like a pelvis-like shape there we go nice and easy so there's our hip control let's go into pose mode and select that as our custom object boom we've got the same problem there we need to actually rotate these hips the hip control to fit so i'm actually going to go into object pose mode cursor to selected go back into object mode section the cursor just to line it up like so and then go into edit mode with that object rotate x up to the appropriate setup and i'm just going to scale it up in edit mode to sort of fit that shape all right cool there's our hips out the way so now we have a control for the cog control for the hips and now we just need controls for the spine so the torso okay let's do that now we're going to grab again i'm just going to grab this guy but i'm going to remove the arrows so i'm going to actually grab the widget from the um cog also from the global control i'm going to duplicate that once more just to save time rename that as um i'm just going to call it widget fk and go into edit mode i'm just going to delete the uh the arrow i don't need that anymore delete the vertices and just have that line down the center so you know that you know where the center line is but you just know it just helps indicate the rotation okay and for the fk here i'm going to choose widget fk i'm going to do the same thing for all of these at these joints here switch it fk and widget and you can see that the bones scale actually um reflects the scale of the control there but we have to worry about that right now let's just rotate this control once more rotate x that'll do done so to make these uh controllers a bit more uh larger all we're going to do is go into pose mode and change the scale of the custom object in the custom shape properties boom okay there's our setup basic setup all done so let's uh reiterate what we've done let's cap it off so what we've got we've got a global control that's controlling everything we got a cog that's controlling the center of gravity of our character and if we had fk legs already this would be the fk licks would stick to the cog so would stick to the global control and the cog would control the rest of the body so this is our torso controls essentially global torso control we have our hips which control the lower half of our body perfect okay and then we have a very simple fk joint chain and it says this is as simple as you can get and we're practically done and if you want to you can go into your bone grip section now we can actually add colors so if you want to you can add colors to our brown group so i can actually call this global assign a color doom make a new one actually i'll add that to the red one as well for the hips i'll make that one yellow [Music] all that hips [Music] and then for the spine i can make it blue [Music] and if we go to our pose mode you can see it's all set up perfect looking pretty pro all right that's it when it comes to the a very simple basic fk spine rig that's how you do it basically oops there we go all right so maybe you're asking why didn't i just add the control uh shapes to the uh deform joints why didn't i just add them to these ones well it's pretty simple one organizationally it's much easier to know which of your bones are deformed rig deformed joints and which ones are control joints secondly when it comes to exporting out a rig exporting out a weight painted piece of animation into a game engine you want to be able to quickly select all your deform joints and your mesh and just export it without worrying about the control setup so you want to have it separate at all times by separating the controls from the deform uh setup that allows you to quickly make sure that when you export a animation rig with just the deformed joints that you are definitely just exporting out the deformed joints and not the control joints that's why it just makes it way easier to organize you know that these these are the only joints that you're going to be using for weight painting you know that these ones don't have any um influence on the weights so you don't have to worry about weight painting these controls and going through the controls in the hierarchy you know exactly that on this layer anything on this layout is deforming anything else is not deforming they're just mechanisms and controls that's why okay anyway i hope this wasn't too confusing for you for to to start off with but that's basically it um in the next video we'll talk about a more advanced spine technique using bendy bones and then after that we'll try another spine technique using spline ik but until then catch us and have fun

Channel: Dikko

Views: 16,521

Keywords: Animation, animated, animate, animatedcharacter, B3D, Blender, Blender3D, character, characterdesign, characterart, cartoon, rigging, rig, armature, learning, tutorial, walkthrough, howto, howtorig, npr, toonshader, tips, tute, tut, stepbystep, help, dikko, dikkotutorial, spine

Id: 4uHY_GuKVSM

Length: 31min 6sec (1866 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020