Cinema 4D Character Animation Tutorial: Rigging for Beginners

hey my name is Cygnus I've been working for a while as a 3d artist I always had a passion for characters and while what can be cinema4d I found first steps in character development being a little bit tricky to get to make your life easier I gather some specifics and combine them in a tutorial for you to learn this series will show you very basics of cinema 4d rigging and character preparation techniques at the end of it I will show you how I do it from the start to the finish so if you already somewhat knowledgeable in retopo or cinemas character tab you can skip directly to the end of the playlist on the first segment I would like to talk about apology and preparing the bundle for rigging topology is very important for seeing the real-time feedback in your viewport and having a flexible process while going through other areas of production like texturing or weight painting here is a few techniques I find useful to create a low poly topology the most basic way is using cinema for these integrated tools like polygon pan for driving geometry polygons snap to draw on a surface x-ray to easily see what you are doing and also you can use symmetry generator for characters that are symmetrical second way is using HP modeling bundle for cinema 4d and has great free topple functions and pre-made Python scripts for the past three topper workflow it has paid plugin but that greatly increases already existing software functionality I will leave more information down below third and fastest way is using rack 3d or Z wrap which works like magic but we have to remember that the process that I'll already in there works strictly for humanoid characters so if you have other type of character like quadra-port you will have to make a base mesh yourself software has a free trial with a full functionality so it's a great tool to know there is also tools you could use like ZBrush zremesher but algorithm is more useful for organic static objects and more often than not it makes a weird loops or geometry that may intervene in the processes down the line and for the last part I want to mention another step after you top I really like to do it's running character through Adobe's mixer mow the waiting I will get from here is not really what I would use for the final rig but it's nice to test if the deformations work with the geometry and also we can later use the joint positions for orienting cinema's character template on top of it on the second segment I will quickly skim through most important tools of the character tab which has everything you need to start rigging characters I will quickly undock it and put it on the side so let me start with a simple joint or a bone whatever you want to call it and what you cannot do with this is you would like to place it in spots where the bones are typically so let me just quickly drag your knot front of you drag it here or so and then we can as well just use a joint tool instead of making bunch of joints over through here you can just hold ctrl and click it and then we click it on the other one while holding ctrl and then on the wrist and then I'm gonna make one more for fingertips even though you will probably with rig separately with bunch of bones but I want to just quickly show the workflow so now we can take a look at our bone structure is here we also going to need to take this this bone here or joint let me call it joint from now on because it may be confusing so you can wrap this and you can move it around but as you can see it takes entire hierarchy together when I'm moving it around like normal so what you can do is you can select a joint tool and if you go on the top view now you can align it how you like it and it automatically detects correct axis when you move it so it corresponds to the parent and rotates the joint so it's a little bit easier to place this way we just go check if everything's fine everything seems fine okay and that's how we have a basic joint structure now we can apply a skin the former to our geometry so for now we will hide this clock and I'm just gonna click on skin here so what you can do now you can drag it under the your geometry that you want to affect white joints so if you don't have the skin the former enabled under your geometry you will not be able to affect it correctly so now what we can do is if you would move the joints you can see nothing is happening yet what we are missing is hiding here in character tags Y by clicking right mouse button type their tags and weight tag so in this section we will weight or we will show which joints this geometry gonna be affected by and if we lock the tab maybe and then select all of our joints here drag it here bump so now if you move the joints so one thing happens one more thing we are missing is actually skinning the arm so for that I'm going to use weight manager here if you click on it let me maybe put it here sorry and now we can put some waiting on our character so the workload I like to do is make a bunch of selections and then I'm just killing it on those selections instead of doing it with the white brush because I think white brush is more suitable for smoothing waiting than actually applying it so here if you hold ctrl and click on T Stubbs you can activate the boat at the same time and now I'm gonna quickly scan this character by going to my mesh selecting what I want to skin so maybe for the beginning of the arm I I want to skin it here on our color go then well how I'm gonna do it is I'm going to select everything else or invert the selection and now skin it to the shoulder part of the arm so you see it a skin entire thing and if you're doing it with this method make sure you have altered or by eyes on otherwise you can apply a bunch of like weightings that are above 100% on on your mesh and that may cause some issues when you're gonna move some of the bones so now for our elbow or forearm I'm gonna select the loop that is closest to the actual rotation of the joint actually maybe even this one as well then select everything else and weight it by clicking apply selected and the mode you can use add if you have outer normal eyes on you can use add and it's gonna do exactly the same as absolute but I kind of like to use absolutely because I'm then I know for sure that the weights are applied on my selection and it doesn't overwrite any other weight okay so I have the forearm weighted now for the rest I'm gonna select again the mesh that's closer to the loop and I selected here we go now if we click on our hierarchy or on the weight tag actually if I click on here we should see all of our colors here or all of our skinning actually and with this we can already remove our color moon you can see it's already moving and the same with our arms and forearms or what not so now what I would like to do is create a quick I can change so we can quickly test our waiting in this tutorial I will show you how to do it from ground up so I want to do the ith chain from the shoulder to the wrist actually instead of that I'm just going to select the top joint of my eye-catching and go to character tags ok I will unlock my attributes manager and I will select a last joint I want it to be in my eye catching so in my case I'll select the country for the goal I'll go to make a goal here this is gonna be our controller and you can see already that we have the ikj going our problem is that the hand weighting is quite sharp so if you see here when you leave in the arm it gets really stiff so what do you want to do yes okay maybe not country it's maybe not reset PSR but just control Z and actually on my goal I'm gonna go to coordinates and I'm gonna go to freeze transformation I'm gonna freeze all so next time if I moved it my I K I can just click reset PSR if you don't have this button you can hold shift C and just type in we said yes R and then select this and drag it on your timeline whatever or how is it called in your menus so if I click reset PSR it goes back to the original position so now what we want to do is smooth out the harm and we're gonna use the weight tool for that you can do the smoothing overweight manager as well but for this kind of job I would actually prefer using you know my own waiting here because maybe I wanted to be a little bit different and I think it kind of gives the school more of this control that you kind of look for when you do this molding of the weights so let's move the arm like this so we can see the artbook that we had before and just gonna select one more way thing and it select the joints I want to be smoothing between and then I'm gonna go to weight tool and here we have the mode and right now I have mode smooth maybe you have add by default but right now I'm gonna use smooth and I'm gonna use only visible only so I want it to be only on my Chairman's reach that I'm seeing here let me scale up the brush little bit by holding ctrl + middle mouse click you can change the scale and I'm just gonna very softly brush it away on the elbow part just actually just clicking nothing too intense so you can see that elbow looks already way better and maybe we also want to smooth out a little bit our bicep part that's tiny bit it doesn't look that bad and let's move about it's also quite sharp but looks way better than it was before if you would do it you know for entire character you would take more time to meet the weights better and actually the elbows and knees usually you want the most difficult parts just can very good so usually do it quite smooth and then you apply some extra waiting on the elbows to make them look better or sharper so anyway what I also want to explore is cluster actually because maybe you're gonna need it for I don't know some specific deformation and I just want to show you how to use it so what you do now is you can select the arm and if you go to the point mode you can select some points for example for example I want to just take the shoulder right so let me scale up my brush and just select the shoulder here right now what I want to do is make the vertex weight or make a vertex tag on my arm that is I'm gonna show where is the selection so we're set vertex weight and let's do a value 50 for example okay so now if I click my vertex weight you can see that it's 50% and it shows by showing this kind of yellowish color if I do 100% the color would be pure yellow and what you can do now is you can make points here and if you drag it under here you can see since we don't have a target all of our points won't still looking like zero position or different of itself and what we can do is just grab like an awl or something and let's feed it to that cluster target this small and if I move my null now I can move this geometry so this is pretty cool for rigging if you want to do like some emotions or if wanna do some emotions and you want to do it procedurally instead of actually doing you know complicated joints on the face or something and you can always just turn it off like this what you can also do and a minute or not the cluster now and delete it because I don't don't need it that much also there is follow ups here and pretty much I don't use them that much because I kind of find them really unuseful in a sense that you can pretty much just wait specific parts of a character and with the joint but again it's kind of like interactive tool so you could change your weighting of your joint interactively by moving the fall-off I will show you really quick how it works so if you take the following let's say let's make a sphere out of it let's scale it down and let's go to our weight tag and let's just drag the fall-off on the joint you want to affect so in my case let's affect 400 turns and now if you'll see the weighting gear and let's show our forum see we have our weighting applied on a forearm but also if I will move my followed here that's where it doesn't affect it for some reason this is really shop wish okay so I have to drag the fall-off on the part where there's another way to affect it so as you can see here our forearm weighting is being applied on upper part of the arm even though the weighting is kind of the same in our weight manager but fall off still effects that other arm so I don't really use it that much but maybe you'll find a good use of it a couple more tools I'm on the show is probably the pose morph so what the pose morph is great for as blood shapes so if you've never heard about blend shapes they are pretty much used all around the you know industry for just facial animations pretty much and then you know you can do a bunch of stuff with them and you can use them for a lot of different things than actually characters so I will quickly show how it looks like if we just click Add post morph and as you see it already applied specific pose more options here but we don't want that I will start from the beginning and just gonna right click go on character tags and go to post more so now we don't have any options pre-selected for us and in our case I want to record only points I mean a rotation as well just to show how it works so back the tag now on the Edit section or an edit mode we pre-made the poses of our affected areas and then on animate we actually animate between them with the sliders so let me quickly show how it looks like so for example if I select some points here let's say are the same area that I selected before and I'm just gonna drag it up right so now if we so since I dragged it up this pose has been recorded on post 0 and if I take the slider and drag it backwards it's gonna go back and now if I click animate I can pretty much just animate with this pose enabled and then I can go to pose more and just play with this this is really awesome for blend shapes and you can do a lot of stuff with this you can do for example if if you bend the arm you can do the muscle popping out from the arm on the same time anyway one more tool I want to show is if I click reset PSR and maybe let's turn off our pose and I don't really need it also I would like to show that you can use poast morph not only for you know moving the geometry points or something but you can also rotate the joints around so for example I want to rotate this this wrist joint and I'm gonna go to character tags again and select post morph and now I select only rotation so now if I just rotate this joint so for example the arm goes up and as you can see it recorded the state and you can do some cool stuff for example I use it quite often on it joints if I want to do for example the hand animations of the finger animation so I want to kind of have these sliders instead of F K's sometimes for the fingers of the character so I use this quite often but for now I just gonna put it on animate and maybe let's keep it on zero so what I would like to show you as well is actually constraining our geometry to something or actually a constraint tag I find the constraint tag being one of the most useful tags and cinema and what did that pretty much does is just takes one object and attaches to another object but what's the cool part about it is that you can do it from anywhere in a hierarchy so for example I have this clock and I want to parent it to my wrist for example so you could do it in a lot of different ways you could actually just wait it and you know apply a skin deformer underneath and pretty much just applying it to this or whatever this joint you could do that what you can also do is use the constraints so if you right click on any other object you go to constraint also we have this empty panel where we can select the moments of constraint so in my case I would like to parent it to to my wrist joint or actually the foreign joint because it's resting on top of it I click on parent and if you go to parent on the target it's gonna be our four up going to this one and now if I move my arm you can see the clock that's attached so that's pretty cool and you can do a lot of different things with constrain for example if I go back to basic you can also detach the clock directly on a joint so for example let me show you if you click PSR it's gonna attach your object directly on the position you want it to be but you can as well use like a maintain original option that is on side PSR to not move the clock and you can pretty much do the exactly the same thing now and as you can see it didn't really parent it the object but it took the position of the forearm if you see here it actually follows the forearm but it is not parent it on a farm so that's also quite cool and you can just some cool effects with it let me go back and what else we can show you there is also clamp part of constrain and mirror and aim that's really useful but I think you can go ahead and just right-click it and show help and figure it out yourself it's really powerful tool so I think that's about it for now and there's other options and character tab like character object or C motion and stuff but I would like to make like another part of the tutorial we could where we could talk about this because this is like you know it's more like as a temp it's like a template objects where you can make you know pretty or we can use pre-made rigs or something and you know if you want to just start out I would suggest to just use these basic tools first and get a rig going with those and then you can you know go and explore the character tab and see motion and stuff because if you don't will not understand the principles it's gonna be way harder to explain the you know character object or something like this also there's a bunch of like premade commands and stuff in a character tab that actually is quite useful for example for creating like a chain if you don't want to make a entire process that we did while making our iCade chain so hard so for example let's delete all of these and for example I want to make the I can shape really quickly you can just select these joints you want to be in AI K chain go to character commands create a key chain so there's a bunch of these and you can go ahead and try it out I really love the for example replace with so what you can do for example I have this there's no object that's not really cool as a controller as a controller it's not really useful I guess we cannot really see on our viewport you cannot have to always select it on your hierarchy so what I find way cooler is if we go to for example one of these primitive splines you can pretty much just let's scale it down it a little bit so the size is nice you can just select your null that was being created by I K and go to character commands replace with and so I click it once and it attaches it to our object and what it's cool about it that it grabs all the information and all the parenting that was done by I K so as you can see here the object that is our I care goal is actually here so that's pretty cool often people get discouraged by cinema4d rigging or rigging in general because after their first rig they get weird delays or glitches like these and that's why priority hierarchies are very important on the part 3 of the tutorial is serious I will talk about some rules and practices to follow that will help you avoid these issues cinema4d calculates everything in its own operational order as you probably know already starting with initial and finishing with dynamics and then in hierarchical order from top to bottom and from left to right in the tack section so by following these rules we can then place our rigged objects in an appropriate order starting with your controllers icaros poles etc which is object status actually going to be animated with the keyframes then entire hierarchy of the character joints which is technically an expression second to last goes your mesh objects with skin deformers and weight tags which falls under the generator class and if you decide to use any dynamic objects for example dynamic loading or hair you will place them last by following this order you'll avoid objects glitching out or delaying but if the problem still occur the former's generators and the most tags have this handy priority tab where we can set custom priority order yet I would highly suggest doing so only as a last resort because it can get very hard to track what goes after what you

Channel: Motion Designers Community

Views: 153,201

Keywords: motion designers community, tutorial, motion design, video, copilot, greyscale gorilla, greyscalegorilla, eyedesyn, brograph, cinema 4d, c4d, animation, c4d animation tutorial, cinema 4d character animation, character animation, cinema 4d character, c4d animation, Beginner

Id: KBADEehcDWs

Length: 28min 3sec (1683 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Kled_Polska]

Oh damn, whoever you are, thank You so much! That's what I needed :D

[u/itsalwayzsunny]

Great Stuff!

[u/raciallyambiguous96]

This is an awesome tutorial.