Control your Blender Rigs like a Pro

hello guys juan hernandez for cgboost.com in this video i will teach you how to control animations using a single controller this can be useful for both hard surface and organic models and not only it will ease the animation process but it will also give you more control over the final result and even fix some issues that you might have when posting a model this video is mainly for intermediate and advanced users but as long as you have a basic knowledge of how bones and armatures work in blender you should be fine so let's get to it [Music] first let's take a look at how this works and then i can show you some practical examples where this can be useful the concept is actually pretty simple we want to make an animation which can be accessed by a controller anything you animate in blender by using keyframes is saved as something called action actions record and contain animation data and we are able to access and trigger that data if we want to so how do we set this up let's try something simple first in this scene i have three bones which i will use for my animation and one extra bone which will be my controller the action should be just a couple of frames since the final timing will really depend on how fast you move the controller so first i set the frame length to 20 frames and i can start working on the animation this is where you can get creative do not just do a linear movement you can play around with the timing and the way things move before getting into final position this will make the animation nicer once i'm done i go over to the dope sheet editor and change the mode to action editor to organize my work i rename the action data name and turn on fake user to make sure that the data is always stored in the blender file now i can close the action editor go back to my timeline and reset everything to the default pose at this point we can connect the action to the bones and make the controller the target we can do that using bone constraints go into pose mode select one of the bones and add an action bone constraint we need to tell blender in which conditions the animation is triggered set the armature itself as the target and the controller as the bone which will trigger the action you can now choose in which direction the controller should move to activate the action in this case since the bones fall down it would make sense to move the controller down as well set the target to local space and the channel to the y location you want to work on local space so that the values are relative to the default position of the controller and the channel really depends on the local direction of the bond controller then set the range depending on how much you want to move the controller so that action is triggered the minimum value means nothing of the action is active and the maximum value the position in which the action is complete in this case i want to move the controller -1 meter along the local y-axis finally choose the action you want to trigger and the amount of frames that action contains in our case it was 20 frames make sure it's all working correctly and then copy the action bone constraint to the rest of the bones that should be affected as well now that everything is working perfectly you can improve the user experience by adding a limit location bone constraint to the controller to make sure that you can move the controller only in the direction you need just make sure to set the owner to local space turn on effect transforms and that you keep the range you need to move the controller something i really like about this workflow is that the action runs on the background so you can select individual bones and do tweaks or changes on top or even go back to the default pose but the bone will keep the action position here you can see how i apply this technique on the robot arm for my last workflow video i created a 20 frame animation which is stored as an action it's pretty simple but i added some extra movement to make the opening look more complex for example the hand rotates a bit to the side and then rotates back the fingers start folding until later on parts of the weapon rotate to one side cables inside actually scale up to cover more space and panels turn around and back to add more movement same as we did before i renamed the action turned on the fake user and connected the animation to the bones over here you can even see it's the same setting we did before amateur as target controller as the bone we work in local space in this case on the y-axis and i use a value of 1 meter to trigger the action i selected the action i want to trigger and the animation frame count lastly i copied the constraints to the other bones and we are done as you can see the controller has a limit location as well and the whole action is triggered on local space so i am able to move the arm around and open the weapon on top another case where this can be super useful is when rigging wings to show you how i made this little guy over here closing up greens can be very time consuming and it's something you really don't want to be doing manually every time you need to close them make a short animation of how the wing should fall something like this will probably take some more time but believe me it will be totally worth it tweak all the bone feathers and make it as good looking as possible once you are done rename the action turn on fake user and connect it to the correct bones in this case i wanted to trigger the animation by scaling down the controller that means that the minimum value is a scale of 1 and the maximum is 1.5 which is the scale i want the action to be triggered at another great case is rigging dragon wings this can be very hard to do and no matter how much weight painting you do there is a big chance that you are going to have trouble folding the wing something extra you can do on top of the things we learnt on this video is using a corrective shape key which activates using the same controller so for a big part is the same process we make an action connect it to the bones and use a controller to trigger the action on top of that we can add a shape key and fix the wing in sculpt mode we can put back the shape of the arm using the smooth brush and the inflate brush we can get rid of the intersections and make overall the final result look better once we are happy with it you can add the driver to that shape key so that it activates in the same way as the action in this case i am moving the controller along the x-axis into the negative direction this way the shape key and the action will slowly activate at the same time and we will get the illusion that it folds correctly if you have any questions or if there is anything related to blender that you would like to know about feel free to ask in the comment section in case you want to take a look both the robot and the bird are available for free at cgboost.com resources where only an email is required in there you can also find our regularly updated blender shortcut pdf i really hope you enjoyed this video make sure to click like and subscribe and see you next time

Channel: CG Boost

Views: 130,370

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, blender 2.9, blender rigging tutorial, blender 2.9 rigging tutorial, blender robot rigging tutorial, blender character rigging, blender simple rigging, blender actions tutorial, blender constraints tutorial, blender character creation, blender character animation, blender armature, blender bones, blender robot tutorial, blender dragon wings, blender bird wings, blender transformer tutorial, blender easy rigging, blender fast rigging, rigging

Id: 83NVOUKt3-o

Length: 7min 26sec (446 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021