Cinema 4D: Rigging with the Character Object

hello my name is russ etteridge and welcome to my youtube channel i'm going to be posting a lot of animation related content here whether it's tutorials or bits of stuff that i'm working on um this is the place where i'm going to be posting it i'm a freelance animator based in brighton in the uk i've been working professionally for about 10 years producing visual effects 2d and 3d character animation my main in-depth tutorials all go up onto skillshare so if you want to do some serious learning go and check me out over there this will be the place where i'll be posting bonus content maybe videos that don't necessarily fit into the main part of the skillshare classes but i'll also be posting other random things either things i'm working on or perhaps time lapses of me working that kind of stuff in this video i'm going to be going over the cinema 4d character object there's a few pros and cons when using the character object so i'll quickly point those out before we actually get stuck in the pros being it's incredibly fast to set up and it's a very advanced rig that comes with lots of bells and whistles things that would take you a long time to set up in your own rigs plus there's a whole bunch of base creature layouts including obviously humans but there's also quadrupeds birds insects that kind of stuff and within those they're all kind of customizable so if you've got a human um you don't have to stick with two arms you can have four arms um or three arms or something like that so yeah it's highly customizable that being said there are a few cons obviously um it doesn't fit each and every situation so if you're modeling something completely random like i don't know like a tin can robot with slug feet or something totally random it's not necessarily going to fit that so keep that in mind plus the fact that the rig is so advanced is almost its own drawback because it's incredibly difficult to adjust the rig once you've made it if you open up the rig hierarchy it's just like explodes with a million billion different objects and they're all attached with espresso and crazy tags so if you've got a character which is doing something really special where you need to actually adjust the rig like maybe the i don't know i mean it is adjustable but if you're doing something like animation that's not led by the hips or you know like the character needs to be held in two different places and you need to attach things in different places all that kind of stuff is quite tricky with this rig because like i said it's just so ridiculously complicated that being said it's still an amazing tool and well worth your time learning it um i've used it plenty for different human characters just because it's such an advanced rig and it's really easy to animate plus it's got plenty of sliders for fine control of different types of things um something that would take a really long time to develop your own rake to do personally i haven't really used the other creatures that much i think i maybe have used it for a horse once but i don't think i've really used the insect or the bird ones those ones i mean those things are quite easy to rig simply anyway i haven't really explored it maybe there's some really cool stuff if you were animating a really complicated bird and bird was like the main feature character in the animation then i'm sure it would be useful for that um but yeah like i said it's really good for humans and we're going to use it on my sort of default character that i've been using for a lot of tutorials so let's get to it so you go to character up here and you just click on character and that creates a base character object so with the um character object selected you get a few options basically this object lets you build the shape of your character obviously you could have preset rigs where it's just an entire rig all ready to go but that rig wouldn't necessarily fit your character and you'd have to work into it a lot so it's not a very useful thing to just have a completely preset rig so what this character object does is it lets you build these advanced rigs but they're really highly adjustable and for example if you've like if your character's only got one leg or it's got four arms or something like that um that you can it accommodates for that so it's pretty amazing or if it's got a tail or something anyway we've just got a regular character so let's just go through take you through the process of building a rig for this character so the first thing we want to do is uh go to the build tab these are these tabs are laid out in order of which you'll be using them so once you've built you then go to the adjustment phase and then once you've adjusted you go to the binding phase and then once it's all ready to go you can just click on animate and then the rig will be in its animatable form it's all uh really straightforward so with the character ready um let's start building so the first thing we need to do is make a root and then we'll put in a base null down here and then click on spine it's generated a spine for us there don't worry it's all out of alignment we'll move on to the adjust tab after we've got all our limbs laid out so now we need arms there's a couple of options here there's bendy arms and then there's ik fk only so bendy arms is even more complicated than the regular ones we don't need bendy arms uh we just need regular arms so if you hold down control or command on mac and click on the arm it will make both of them left and right so with the arms selected you can click on hand hold down control and click on hand and it will make a hand null so the hand now we need and then we need a thumb so you can choose fk ik thumbs i guess if we hold down control it'll be all right this is where i mean where it gets a little bit overcomplicated so this character doesn't have a joint in the thumb it's just a little stubby thumb but yeah with the character object even though it's highly adjustable you still get all the joints so this is like physically accurate that's fine like if we were going to do binding you could just bind it to this one joint we don't need to bind it to everything it's worth noting here that the hands of my character are orientated facing forwards generally you should model your character with the palms facing downwards towards the ground so the palms are facing the ground that's how the character object is expecting you to have modeled your character i don't think there's actually a way to change that in the character object obviously if you're making your own rig then it will work that's how we did it in my skillshare class but um it still caused us problems anyway i should have modeled this character the palms facing down that was a bit of a mistake on my part but yeah just to just a note if you're modelling your own character and especially if you're using the character object make sure that the character has its palms facing downwards so obviously we haven't done the legs yet so let's go back to spine because the legs come off the spine we want ik fk legs you can also select bendy legs there which you don't need so hold down control again command and click on leg you might have seen in there there's a bunch of other options you can do eye jaw and it just goes on and on so that's it that's basically the rig made if you just click straight to animate now you can give it a test you can see that all the knee and the arms are working nicely but let's go back to build so the next thing you need to do after you've built your rig is to adjust it because obviously these arms are coming out the top of his head at the moment which isn't right we want the arms to come out of the arms so you go to the adjust tab and then the rig changes to this incredibly user-friendly view allows you to all these parts of the rigs to exactly what you need for the character so the best thing to do is just to go to this front view and then you can just start moving these around so the shoulder goes there elbow goes there wrist is okay and you just like you don't have to worry about the alignment of these things because it just sorts out for you there there is a few bugs with this it's not 100 accurate so i can't remember exactly what but there's some quirks so it's possible it is possible to mess this up a bit so you might have to try again try a couple of times i think there's something with i think there's something with straight arms there's something with if your feet aren't 100 straight it will get a bit confused that kind of stuff you just have to redo it make sure your um knees are more straight or your legs are straight you might have to adjust your model to accommodate this rig because if you're going to use the advanced biped riggers obviously it's only going to do what it's capable of doing so yeah just be aware that there are um limitations to the to its magic just to illustrate the point i'm not i'm not doing this particularly accurately okay see look this is another thing you got to be careful because um these things are are kind of like attached to the rig to certain extent do things in a certain order like i should have positioned that first once you've done the adjusting you can go to binding so you go to bind i'm just going to actually bake this symmetry yeah go to binding drop your anything that you want to skin any mesh that you want to skin to the object here like for example if he had some clothes he had a t-shirt on or you know if they were separate objects this is all one object just from just trying to keep it simple at this point but having multiple objects is perfectly fine when rigging so you just drop those in there and it will do some kind of like automatic waiting but then you can just go in like an entirely normal rig if you'd like more details on how to bind a character then you can check out my in-depth rigging class the link is in the description i would mention like look how many bones there are there's like tons more bones um joints than when we made the rig ourselves so that's one of the downsides of using this character rig anyway let's say you've gone through and you've bound the character and it's all looking nice and neat and tidy then uh you're ready to just click on the animate tab and start animating really all these controllers are ready to go yeah one thing to point out i'm not sure why it does this it didn't used to do this i don't think but you can it's got two rigs in here so one of them is ik and the other one is fk so and you can switch between those really easily if you click on the leg object and you go to controls um you get a load of controls in here you can knee twist sliders it's got foot roll sliders so you can do all these kind of cool things with the feet yeah make sure you set up all these axes and see the axis at the back is in the wrong point here that needs to be right on the heel um so the axis is slightly wrong there but i didn't really spend time setting this up very accurately yeah so we've got the ik fk slider so that will link to the fk rig and then you can start animating from there they're like two separate rigs and um it just shows both of them i don't know if maybe i've got the display settings wrong but yeah it shows them both and there's the same thing going on the arms you can see the other you can see the fk rig pointing out there so yeah that's the character object display so we click on the character and go to display obviously at the moment it's all you get to see is these weird special icons which there's a lot of stuff going on here so it's not showing you the joints but you can see them if you go to managers object manager it's only showing the components at the moment if you change this you've got loaded options in here but if you change it to full hierarchy then you can see the true extent of this rig all these joints all these nulls all these crazy espresso tags can um constraints just goes on and on and on and on and on forever it's really good whoever made this is a genius is all i'm saying and um this is what i mean when i say rigging is a rabbit hole that you can go down this is what a really good rig looks like that's the character object yeah i would highly recommend using this so just go for it like i said before knowing the knowing the basics and understanding roughly how rigs work will be a huge benefit to you even when using this character rig because you're inevitably going to be want to be attaching stuff to this you need to know the difference between ik and fk to be able to use those sliders so knowing what you're lacking in your own rigs if you're just starting out rigging just just knowing all that stuff to a certain level will make you appreciate all the controls that you get with this rig go ahead and um make some amazing character animation okay great so like i mentioned at the start skillshare is where i do all my full in-depth tutorials so if you're interested in doing a full character rig from scratch i've got a class on there where i go through it from joints explaining fk ik and all that kind of stuff if you sign up with the link below in the description you'll get a 14 day free trial so if you're interested in learning rigging from scratch and learning about all the tools in cinema 4d head over there that's where the in-depth class is i'm planning on posting more stuff on here regularly and i think there's a couple more videos that will be attached to the rigging class um upcoming soon so if you're interested um hit subscribe and be sure not to miss those so thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Russ Etheridge

Views: 309

Keywords: animation, tutorial, cinema 4d, c4d, rigging, character, character object

Id: _CpakdLn4vA

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 30 2021