Cinema 4D & Mixamo Tutorial - Fast & Easy 3D Character Rigging & Animation

hey everybody its ijen from I design comm and today I'm going to be showing you the easiest way to rig the traditional way we're talking with joints and weights and controls and all that good stuff using mix ammo and the brand new mixing mode control rig that was added to cinema 4d r21 let's go ahead and check it out alright so here we are in cinema 4d and here is our character that we want to rig up now what we need to do first is prepare this rig so whatever kind of rig whatever kind of character you have there's some important things you need to setup first before you can get it up and running with mix mode because mix ml has a preferred way of working with characters okay so the first thing is you need to have your character in this T pose or like the Scarecrow pose with the arms out at either side like you're gonna go out and hug someone in the thumbs facing forward another thing is you want to have your character sitting at zero zero zero so centered in your viewport okay and you're also going to want to make sure that your feet are planted right on the ground so you don't want to have your character kind of intersecting the floor because that's gonna cause some problems in Maximo so just make sure that your feet are not you know going through the floor plant it on the floor and that's basically it as far as the character goes okay now you can have separate head all that stuff or one complete mesh so you can see that this character this is actually a mixin mo character that I downloaded from Mick Simone and I actually show you how you can download this yourself but we have these a bunch of separate objects and that's totally fine mix mo can handle that you can even have like a separated head separated arms legs all that good stuff so one important thing to note about materials if you have default you know fault like Beckmann reflections and stuff like that that is not going to translate over to mixin oh okay so there's a certain step you need to take to maintain any reflectance or color information in your materials that you apply to your character so what you're gonna have to do is kind of throw it back to the Past and instead of using the new will reflect in kind of channels that we've been accustomed to in the past few versions that cinema4d we actually need to go back again to the past and go and use reflection legacy okay so you can see I have that already set up and if you want for now you're gonna not want to load it up here because it's not gonna be recognized by mixing oh it's not gonna maintain your material but if you load it up in the layer mask here and just load up a Fornell so I'll just clear this out and just do this manually so by default this is what it looks like just gonna go ahead and grab for now and then here you can adjust the overall amount and you can see that it's actually controlling this slide or two of that reflectance you can get in that real world reflection fall off with the fur now there okay so with that all set up it's basically all you need to worry about here as far as textures go just remember keep it in legacy keep it old-school as far as the materials go and then what we're gonna be ready to do now is to export a file that can be recognized by mix amount now if we go to file go to export the two file formats that mix Mel likes the most is obj and FBX okay so there's obj but I found that FBX saves and retains a lot more information so if I go ahead and go and choose FBX export one of the things we're gonna do is if you have subdivision surfaces which I actually don't right now but if you do have it in your scene you don't want to make sure you turn on subdivision surface so it actually maintains that alright another thing you want to pay attention to is make sure that textures and materials and embed textures are in there so this is you know we're just using color channels here but if you actually had a you know a jpg texture or something like that you want to make sure that you're embedding that and as far as everything else we are all good usually the default settings outside of this subdivision surface you don't have to worry about I think by default subdivision surface you need to check that on but one very important step and this is kind of similar to you know if you want to save a you know an illustrator file out as an imported into cinema 4d as splines you need to save as an older ill straighter version where there's something similar like that in this FBX export as far as working with mix amel you need to go back to an older version I believe the the version that you need to go back to is all the way back to 2013 using the 7.3 if you don't do this correctly Mixon will actually give you an error and then show you a dialog box that'll say like hey check this out here's how to set up your your file and all that good stuff so if you need to troubleshoot make something has really great troubleshooting guides but so let's say that seven point three and we're gonna hit OK and then just choose wherever you want to save it and let's just save it here okay and that's gonna say about your FBX file now we are ready to go ahead and jump into mix mo here right so mix amell it got bought out by Adobe a few years ago unfortunately as far as I know they are no longer updating it which kind of stinks so go bug Adobe about that tell them that we love mixed smell we want some freaking updates okay so go go bug them about that but anyways mixin o comes free with your Creative Cloud subscription which is really awesome so you just go to mixed-mode comm and you just sign in using your Creative Cloud sign in and you can either browse characters which is a bunch of different characters here that you can download you can see there's my little X bot that I had that I just changed the colors on that I just showed you in cinema 4d but you can download all these other kind of characters here okay and I'll just exit out of that basically all you got to do at that point is just download okay so we got the characters here and we have the animations now you'll notice that right now we have the T pose I don't know what by default what might be there I think sometimes it's like a dancing one which is always fun the dancing pose the dancing animations are just great but if you want to actually use one of these characters in here like I did what you want to do is go to the character you want to use go to animations and here we have this search bar just search for T pose and you can use this little scarecrow guy okay and you can adjust all these little you know posture sliders which is really awesome so you can go ahead and download this and you'll be ready to go okay and this will actually include the joints with it so you don't have actually have to you know go through the steps of exporting anything out if you want to use one of these preset character rigs here okay but again I have a character that I changed the colors on and everything so instead of using the character that's already here you can actually upload a character so whatever character you make and export it out of cinema4d you can actually upload here too so let's just go to upload character and we're gonna select that FBX file that I just showed you how I saved out there and here we go there's my T pose right there that I just saved out and what it's gonna do is it's gonna upload it's gonna process okay so we can just you know wait a moment and I can just ask you you know how is your day going and you'll say fine and I'll say that's great and here we go that was a great conversation but now what we do is make sure that this is orientated right if this is upside down or something you can use the rotation all this good stuff but typically if you set everything up inside a cinema 4d like I showed you you know having everything centered and all that good stuff you should be fine to go and this should be fine so next thing we're gonna do is just hit the next Next button and here's where we can place all the markers okay so it's very self-explanatory we're gonna put the chin where the chin is we got this really nice you know in the upper right corner the little zoom there so we can get the wrists right there and get really precise let's get the elbows in there again really precise that upper corner there it's always good to reference that just to get really nice precision there then we got the knees right about there and then the crotchal region which will place right about there okay so once we have all that set up the only thing we have to mess with now is this standard skeleton this is basically how many fingers do you have do you have a character that's wearing like a mitten or do you have a more cartoony characters that don't you don't want to rig the fingers you can use this little oven mitt version the 3-chain all this good stuff and actually have this character that has full-on five fingers all separated and ready to go because again I am using one of the preset miksa motors so we'll be able to utilize the fully rigged fingers so what we're gonna do is just go and use the standard skeleton and then hit next and then this is where the magic happens all the hamsters are running really fast on me mix most servers and there's a lot of really crazy stuff going on behind the scenes basically what it's doing is it's taking those markers that we placed in 2d and a flat 2d plane and it's you know instruct constr a plating is that extract extrapolating yet I have time to mess up words while we're kind of just waiting here but it's extrapolating all that information applying it to your 3d rig so once we're done with the processing and the mix of male hamsters are done spinning their wheels we're dumped to this screen and this is basically - if I just click and drag here I can actually you know orbit around here this is where you want to check to make sure your rig is all good and we can go ahead and just zoom in here like clicking and dragging in here you can use the pan tool click and drag and you're just kind of making sure that everything looks all right you know even the fingers look really great they're bending really awesomely so it looks like I place the markers pretty well okay so again this mixable rig is really really great for humanoid figures I've had mixed results with more cartoonish kind of figures and I'll show you that I'll show you that right now actually so here's my little link and you can see that it's not as smooth as that character that I just showed we got some really wonky stuff going on here some really just weird stuff going on that you know if you want to actually fix this and do some weight painting knock yourself out put on your bob ross afro and do some weight painting but you know it's a lot of manual process sometimes you know it's hit and miss with these more cartoony characters okay but for these type of characters these traditional bipeds it's great as I'm on the subject of talking bipeds one thing mixed-mode does not do is quadrupeds okay so you need you know your your traditional head torso and arms and all that good stuff if you're wanting to you know rig up a Kirby or something like that it's going to be a little ruff okay so let's go ahead everything looks good we're gonna hit next this is gonna dump us into our tee pose because that's what actually what we had selected but we all know we want to grab some dancing here so let's go ahead and we'll just X out of the tee pose and we'll get the Samba dancing see how that looks looks perfect because again we're using the model that is actually being used in all of these little previews here but you can get the the booty shake and hip-hop dancing kind of thing going on but for each of these dancing poses if you want to do dancing or any kind of animations we have all these little or make some oh has all these we have like I work from Mexico miksa mo has all of these sliders to change like the energy like how fast this this dancing is maybe this character has she had a lot of coffee so she's just really amped up and even the overdrive that speeds things up even more we also have character arm space where if you have very big bulky arms or big bulky chests sometimes you can have intersections so you can see if I bring this way down we're gonna get intersected with the torso and you can also choose a different amount of total frames so all of these rigs kind of they they loop very nicely at least most of them but you can also just you know if especially if they're walks or dances but you know the stand up that's not gonna loop you know that's just your standing up but for dancing but for walking you can do this loops or you can you know extend this so a lot of really great stuff in the in the little features all these little sliders for each of these individual poses and stuff like that okay so but again we're just gonna we're not gonna even worry about any of these preset animations let's just say we want to animate from scratch so what we're gonna do is we just want a fully rigged character with the T pose because that's the you know the starting position that you actually want to start rigging and animating from okay and this is what the pose that works best with the mix and mode control rig again that was introduced in our 21 so let's go ahead I'm gonna download this character again we can adjust the posture if we want to but I'll just leave that we'll download this all these default settings are fine I'm gonna go ahead and download and it's going to then dump out another FBX and we can just go ahead and jump back into cinema 4d and open that so go to open project this will be my downloads folder so we'll just double click that and everything by default is great here you really don't have to worry about any of that we'll hit OK and you'll see that we have this all these joints okay no animation because again this is just a typical T pose and then we have our objects our geometry with the skin to former so again we're rigging traditionally with skin deformers and weight tags okay you can see all the the weights the weighting coming from all these joints and then here's all of our joints there's a lot of joints going on here but one thing you're gonna notice is that my character came in very shiny so while some of the things kind of came in okay and we still have if I double click on one of my materials here you can see that the color came through we just have to adjust the reflectance now one thing you're gonna see is that I can't actually access any of these options here and one of the weird things is that when you import an FBX from mix ammo' it actually creates a take okay and that's kind of why I can't access anything so what you can do is if the if you actually exported out an animation and you delete this mix ammo' take it's gonna delete the animation of your character okay so you don't want to do that so instead just go ahead and just click on the override the auto override auto take and here we can go in and actually be able to adjust all this stuff here so you can see my color is still intact I'm gonna have to fuzz around with some of these settings here like we we need to you can see that they defaulted the specular and reflection default into a hundred percent even though we had it down to you know about twenty or something like that but that's fairly easy stuff going into the reflection adding back your roughness and all that good stuff so it's kind of a pain but not that much of a pain because at least our colors and everything are still intact there so that's all well and good we got our joints but we want to set this up so we can actually you know animate this you know how can I actually animate this I have no controllers if you're familiar with rigging at all you know you have little null controllers that you can click in the viewport and move all your your objects and that's exactly where the mixin mode control rig again introduced in our 21 and again if you don't have our 21 I'm gonna show you another option actually I'll just show it right now that if you don't have it let's go to Chrome and this is what's this art H character tools gives you a whole setup that actually creates all these controllers for you so if you're not on our 21 yet and you still want to use mixed-mode a you know wait and rig up your character with joints you can use this download this it's on sale right now so really great stuff this this person who made this is just a really great talented character person go ahead buy that and you'll be good to go but if you do have our 21 lucky you how you eat you hat we can access the character the mix mode character control rig so where are you gonna find that is in your character menu we're gonna grab character and we're gonna go to our object tab and it's by default it's set to the mix mode control rig okay so all we need to do is start building out our component so we got the route we got the pelvis and what we're gonna do is we're gonna click the leg but instead of just clicking the button we're gonna hold the command in the shift key down because what that's going to do is create both legs at once and still keep us in this little view here and then what I'm going to do is just hold down the command key now and create the arms and then create some hands so that's gonna create the left and right arms if you hold the commander control key down okay so now we got all of our components what we're gonna do is go to adjust and what you're gonna see is that it automatically snapped to where our current joints are here you can see that okay so now what we can do is go into anime and if we go and we click on this rig and move this around you're gonna see that we don't have a relationship built between this control rig this character control rig and our mix mo on our object in our mixer mode joints so what we need to do is go to the route I'm gonna go to the control tab and we're just gonna go ahead and say retarget all in what that's gonna do is if you look at any of your little components here you're gonna see we just built a relationship automatically by clicking that that that button to retarget all of the joints you can see here the left leg all these joints are now populated and now we can use these controls here to then move everything around but again you're not seeing any of the object move your you're seeing the joints move but not our actual geometry and we have to do one more step to actually build the relationship between not only the character object and the joints but the character object and the actual objects so we're gonna say we're gonna need to transfer some weights here so we built the relationship between your joints we need to build a relationship between the weights so what we're gonna do is just drag and drop all the objects with weight tags on them into this weight tags field here and then just click transfer weights and you'll see that something else something snapped there a little bit you'll see wallah check this out we got our fully rigged character with all those controllers that before the mix mode control rig you'd either have to build manually or get something like those RH character tools that I just showed prior and again you're seeing that the mix mo joints are just kind of stationary so we actually don't need these anymore visible at least we still need them in the scene but we can just hide them okay and here's where we can just you know start animating these little controls here and one of the coolest things about the mix mode control rig is if you notice depending on which component you click on as long as you're in the controls tab you have all these little slider that adjust different things now again some of these things might not work perfectly you might have to go in and again wait paints and smooth things out so there is a manual process to this but you have like a little foot roll there right at the bottom and if you go to the hands one thing that's really cool is I can select both the hands and you can like adjust the spread of the fingers okay and adjust the curls of some of these fingers as well so we can get a fist going really easily and again that does not look ideal so nothing is perfect but mixed milk gets you pretty dang close again you'll have to wait paint and wait painting is just the the absolute worst part of rigging is just making sure everything looks good and that's the manual process again that's the downside of rigging so it can get you so far and then you'll need to know something about weighting and rigging and all that good stuff to get it looking perfect again no way painting in bendy limbs rig just calling that out again here so this is really great if you know when you use mix ammo and I see a lot of people using mix ammo and you know mixing animations together using motion tracks and all that good stuff and actually leave some good tutorials about motion tracks and all that good stuff in the description of the video so be sure to check that out but here's where you can you know just animate your own character your own way again if Maxim only has so many animations if they have a lot of animations but again thing is they're not updating them okay so again bug Adobe about that but this actually came in pretty well sometimes you might have to you know wait paint a little by shift double clicking and you know kind of going in here and seeing what what's controlling what and again this is kind of like the more manual process of traditional rigging and for a character like this again miksa mode does an amazing job but for more cartoony characters again I can show you the the link version where we just got all this stuff going on and the weights look really bad and you'll probably have to go in there and really get into some you know a lot of heavy lifting as far as fixing this and again if you if you have like rubber-hose cartoony style of characters maybe they don't have heads or anything like that then that's where I really want to push the the bendy limbs and make you aware of that as well because as easy as it was to use mix them out in the mixed mode control rig it's also equally as easy to use the bendy limbs rig to be able to rig up a more rubber hose II kind of character where you don't want these sharp bends here you want a more smooth orking kind of been like that but again for for just these type of traditional bipeds it is quite amazing to be able to rig up something this easy and r21 also came with way better Auto weighting as well so that's a thing that's really cool so be sure to check that out but yeah animate your own booty shake in here okay so that's always that's always a thing alright so hopefully that blew your mind if you weren't familiar with mix ml about how you can actually rig up a character super easily again using the traditional route now if you're too overwhelmed with weight painting and all the manual stuff you have to do with traditional rigs be sure to check out Bennie limbs rig for cinema 4d removes all of that complexity and you can rig up an animate more stylized cartoonish characters with those rubber hose limbs so check that out but if you have any questions about anything I covered in this tutorial please leave a question in the comment section below and if you make anything using the mix of moe rigs I know r21 isn't quite out yet but if you make anything with this rig be sure to share it with me I love seeing all your mix and moe characters and mixed moe animations get into those dancing animations there are a lot of fun but if you like this tutorial please I appreciate if you like this tutorial like this video and if you like what I'm doing here please subscribe hit the bell so you can get notified every time I do a new tutorial but that's gonna be it for me thank you guys so very much for watching as always I'll see you next time bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 39,542

Keywords: mixamo, mixamo control rig, mixamo rig, mixamo rigging, cinema 4d mixamo, c4d mixamo, c4d rigging, 3d rigging, 3d rig, character rigging, cinema 4d r21, c4d r21, c4d tutorial, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema 4d, c4d, mograph, motion graphics, mograph tutorial, eyedesyn, learn c4d, mixamo c4d, mixamo cinema 4d

Id: V47g00NMfD8

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019