Cinema 4D Tutorial - Rigging a Character Using Spline IK

hey everybody its EJ from I design calm we've got really fun one today you are going to learn how to rig and animate a walks like go on a simple cartoon character alright so this is what we're going to be making today we're going to be animating a little lemon guy here because when life hands you lemons you throw a cutesy little face on it and give it a walk cycle right so this is a what we're going to be doing we're going to show you how I use spline ik4 the arms of the legs set that up and then just animating all the different aspects to create our happy jolly walking lemon it'll be easy peasy lemon squeezy I'm sorry the lemon puns are just going to be coming out in full force in this tutorial so I apologize in advance so here we go here's our lemon and he's got a little bit of an issue because you got one arm and one leg and this is just because we're going to set up the this is the right yeah right side of our lemon first and then use some of the character tools in cinema 4d to basically just duplicate mirror it so you only have to set it up for one side basically so let's start by adding some spline I K to the arm and the leg so my arm is basically a capsule my leg is basically a glorified capsule with a little nubby at the bottom for his little Tootsie and that's basically it so what we're going to do is I like to call this technique of spline I kind of like using the puppet tool and After Effects so you basically set points where you want the tension to be like a little point for bending around me and then like a pivot point at the hip and the foot and same thing for the arm so like the shoulder the elbow and the hand or the little nub on our guy here so that's that's kind of how I like to explain it so we're going to use spline okay and I go through spline I K in all that stuff in depth and another tutorial that I'm going to link to it that if you want to learn more about spline I K and just I K in general definitely check that out so I'm going to just go through spline I k first you need a spline hence the name and what we're going to do is basically just like you would with your puppet tool is basically have like a tension point for the shoulder bendy point for the elbow and then a tension point for the hand right so there's our spline and this will be our right arm spline and basically what I want to do now is just go and select all these points and make sure they're all on the same Y plane so I'm just going to zero out the size and the Y so they're just straight like that and then I just need to make sure that I have this all lined up and you'll notice that once I went to my object mode my anchor point went to zero zero zero and one handy little shortcut I have up here is the center axis - and what that's going to do is actually Center the access to the bounding box of your object or their spline so I have this docked and some Verdi I use this a ton so it's always helpful to just kind of put all your most frequently used buttons up here so I have a few up here so I'm just going to hit the center axis - you can see that's now centered on my spline now I can just move this forward it's go to let's go to a four view for now what let's go to four views there we go and just want to make sure let's go to our top view here so want to make sure that we are positioning everything correctly so this is kind of important so that's all lined up that looks all nice and good in all of our views here and now let's actually add some spline ik2 this the first the first thing I want to do is actually to actually get the spline to move our geometry we're going to introduce a little spline wrap so we'll just make that a child of our right arm and we're just going to use this spline this right arm spline to control and move our arm so let's go ahead and to add I K to this so when we move the point here on the tip of the arm it actually moves the rest of the arm and the elbow bends and all that good stuff we're going to add some spline I K but the first thing we need to do before we add spline I K is when you're using I kind of want to give your cinema 4d AI K system a little bit of a hint as to what direction your elbow is going to point to so right now everything's straight so it's just kind of guess what direction you want the elbow to point to so what we're going to do is just give it a little hint and say hey oh hey mr. cinema 4d I K system we want the elbow to actually point this away so facing the Z so what we're going to do is just give it a little bit of a hint by just nudging that elbow point just a little bit back so you can see it's a little bit crooked Quint right why don't what word I'm trying to figure out here just a little bit bent there we go I want to say crinkled just a little bit bent right there so that gives it our I K system a hint as to what direction we want the elbow two points useful backwards so what we're going to do to add AI K is right click go into the character tags here and go to AI K not I case mine but I K and what we're going to see is that there's this point I case system and this is the key and when you activate the point I K system and when you apply the IQ tag to a spline what you're going to need to do then is define where your spline starts in to ends how many points does it have so right now our spline has three points but how this point system works is that the number actually starts at zero not one so we have point zero point one and point two so our point system our point IQ will start at point zero that's our shoulder and will end at point two and you can see that we now have this green collect connecting line here and that's pretty much what we want and now all we have to do is say okay now let's create a goal which is basically a null I'm just going to make that really really quick is basically a null that controls where your hand is and you can see once I move this around you can see hey there's my elbow it's pointing the correct direction so that's awesome you can see now we have like a little arm and now he's waving to you he's having a good old time so this is working perfectly so what we're going to do is just kind of move this back in place here and the one thing I want to go over is let's just rename this right arm goal so we know that's our goal and what I want to do is you can see that and this is all your personal preference but this elbow is fairly sharp and another thing that we probably need to do is up the height segments so we don't have any crinkling so we know we have using the phrase crinkling I don't know why any kind of Jagan Asst in our spline or our little elbow there because we don't have much interpolation in this spline point so it's going to have a sharp point so what we can do to soften that out is actually change the point interpolation from bezzie a to say like b-spline you see we have like more of a noodley kind of thing with way more of a curve we also have if I just bend this and just go through all these different types here we got akima which is a way bigger arc and then cubic which is a little bit tighter arc so it's all your personal preference I like the b-spline I don't know why I just like it a little bit less curvy a lot more macaroni ish so now we got our arm and it's a point in the right direction I'll got good stuff so that would be our arm swinging with the walk cycle and that looks good so now with that all set up just one more thing I want to do before I actually duplicate this and create our left arm setup and that is to be able to easily select the goal in our viewport I'm going to change the display from dot to circle and then just increase the radius here so the great thing about that is when it comes to animating and doing the walk cycle all this stuff I don't have to go into my object manager here to grab the goal I can just go in my viewport and grab that little bounding display circle for my null and then just start animating and keyframe and right there so that's a nice little useful tip so now I got my arm group my arm geometry with the spline wrap we can actually hide the spline wrap here so we don't see it and let's actually go into our filter and say I don't want to see deformers which that's actually off oh no I still see the DES former let's uh let's see what's going on let's just turn that off there we go had a little lag in the viewport I think so we don't see that and now we can just collect all this stuff together the spline the goal drag this all under one null so this is a right arm group everything's named that's very important we have our four right and with the null selected of the the topmost parented null I'm just going to go into the character menu and use the mirror tool and what the mirror tool does it's very aptly named it basically just mirrors your setup and you specifically for like right and left legs you know all right and left arms all that good stuff so the only thing we're really going to touch in this mirror tool is this naming tool which is really really handy because what you can do is replace letters with other letters or words with other words so what's going to search through our object hierarchy and the names of all of our objects and if we say replace our space because if we didn't have that Acey would actually try to look at every our so it would replace these ARS in arm as well so in or the are and ramp and we don't want that so we're going to do our space and we're going to replace it with L space and then what that's going to do is look for all the ours followed by a space and replace them with L and a space so now what can do is just go to the mirror tool and two things are going to happen number one you can see hey it's not our lemons not Gympie anymore has its left arm and we also have our left arm group and it's all renamed from ours to L so perfect that's exactly what we wanted and let's just double check to make sure our arm is working the way it should yep looking good looking good lemon now we just need to work on that leg issue now you're like a pirate lemon let's give you another leg so uh let's see let's let's go and close these up and we want that to be a part of the main lemon group right there and let's work on that leg problem that gimpy leg problem so we're going to go into our four up view and same thing like we did with the arms we're going to create a spline for our leg so it's just go in here create a point let me delete that I had a my leg selected I'm just going to select a point create a point right by its torso one right at the knee right there and then one at the foot right at the bottom of the foot right there and let's just make sure it's positioned correctly and of course it's not so what we're going to do again is just Center access to push this in place make sure that we are all set there and we'll rename this this is the right leg spline splint spline there we go and again we want to make sure that this is all lined up in except for the knee again we want to give the a case system a little bit of an idea of what we want the elbe or the knee to point to so we want to point forward like a normal human being or Norman normal happy lemon character with arms and legs and we want that to point forward so we'll just push that forward a little bit and now we can do the same thing and create a spline wrap so we'll get a spline wrap make a CH out of our right leg bring our right leg spline boot right in there and you're going to notice that we got some weirdness going on here and that is because we need to change the axis of orientation of how our object is facing so I think it's a negative why that will fix it so now we got it working good but now it looks like he was in an unfortunate skiing accident and broke his ankle it's facing the wrong direction so all we need to do is we can either rotate this the correct direction or we can change the up Vector to a positive one in the X and that'll straighten everything out now we can actually go and apply our US spline okay so again we're going to chant turn on point I K and same thing we got three points in our spline so it's going to start point zero in a net point two and we got that green line again let me actually just turn off my spline wrap there so we can more clearly see got the green and if everything works correctly all we got to do is add a goal and we'll just rename that null right leg goal and let's just move this round and see if everything's working as it should and it is cool so again we have a really pointy elbow or elbow knee and that's all well and good if you want to do that or if you want to have more of a curved spline we can do that as well by again changing it from bezzie a to b-spline and now it's a little bit more cartoony and a lot more macaroni II sure so it's all again all your preference how you want that to been what your point interpolation is going to be but there we go and again we can go into our display and change this to circle increase the radius and now we can just be in our viewport here and just select this and you can do a little one-legged tap-dance but let's have them be able to do a two-legged tap dance like a normal lemon guy and let's go ahead and do doot doot let's collect all of our left leg our right leg right leg his right leg elements so the the goal the spline the the leg geometry with the spline wrap and we got that all in one group and again we have everything named correctly with the R and the space so then all we have to do again is go to the mirror tool and again this is already saved from the last time we edited this so everything should be fine so we'll just go and do mirror and that looks good and if we select the left-leg goal and move this around sweet everything's point in the right direction and now I can do tap-dance with both legs great so that is basically it for prepping the eye k for everything before we start animating the one last thing I want to do is everything is going to be in our lemon main group here so we can move everything around except for the one thing I want to take out from this hierarchy are these leg goals and the reason for that is because now I can actually move this whole lemon group and those legs will stay planted for the most part to the floor and that's kind of important when you're doing walk cycles so that's pretty much it for set up for the eye k and now I can kinda we can get ready to animate and give this take this guy for a walk

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 137,825

Keywords: Motion Graphics, Cinema 4d, Mograph, Tutorials, eyedesyn, c4d tut, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d, cinema4d, mograph, motion graphics, point IK, rigging, character rigging, walk cycle, character walk cycle, animate a character walk cycle, rigging a character in cinema 4d, cinema 4d rigging, c4d rigging tutorial, cinema 4d rigging tutorial, cinema 4d character rigging, how to rig a character in cinema 4d, rigging a character in c4d

Id: 4FZun6_bZjA

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2016