Easily Rig A Simple Character (Blender 2.91 Tutorial)

so there's a couple different ways to create a rig for your character i've been using auto rig pro but for the sake of staying free we're actually going to use free software we're going to use rig fi which is built right into blender and you can access it by just making sure you have it installed under the add-ons menu so just like we installed the node wrangler you go into edit preferences um you're going to want to install rigifi rig ify just make sure it's selected and it's it's super straightforward so a couple things first this guy your mesh make sure your origin is at the center so ctrl a apply the location cool i don't think that matters as much for the mesh as it does for the armature but um nonetheless it doesn't hurt to keep it there so we can go ahead and shift a and now that you install rigify you get more options under the armature section and you might instinctively click human but i actually like to go for such a simple character i like to add a basic human meta rig and we have our human meta rig and automatically it sort of shows you the differences right it's the same height except look how low our torso is and look where the head should be so if you're feeling so inclined to this is a good time to start tabbing edit mode and just maybe with proportional editor turned on um just sort of start going in through here and giving things a push or pull up or down um just in just in the slightest to like um keep things a little more aligned to like hey this is how tall a human should be right move this up just a little bit and i don't even want to affect the the shape of the head we just created but i i think that looks a little goofy to be honest you don't have to stick perfectly to like this is what a human should be like this is again it's a stylized character so you pick and choose the one things that are important are hey where are these these little circles lining up because they should line up with the knees and does this line up with the elbows and we're going to go through and we're going to edit all that so you've added in your human what we can do now is i like to just go right into edit mode turn on x symmetry up here so anything you do to one side of the armature it reflects on the other side it's just a quick and easy way to get this in place i like to delete this piece because it i don't need it really that piece operates the breast of a character so perfect we deleted that let's just start putting things into place so grab these guys here and i work with the arms first and i sort of put them down where they where i feel like they should be you can sort of zoom in and pull this guy right to the tip of the fingers this one can go to the to the wrist and this one goes right on your elbow right on that little middle crease of the three you created that little three box with the bevel before you don't put it right in the middle just so it it bends perfectly around that on each side and if you look from the top view you can also get another view of where's this lining up so i'll put that one back there put the hand more in the center of the hand maybe even move this a little closer because our head is so big um which again this is not natural like too anatomy speaking but it thinks your head should be starting up here i honestly just grab all these guys including this one and i just like bring them down a little bit uncheck that one bring this one you want to have you want to make sure these are touching there still and just bring them bring them down just keep working their way down and it's important that this piece here is at the the base of the head this big one i like to bring the whole head bone the whole way up this is actually the head bone so this is what's going to move everything so it's important to keep that in the right place and the neck too is important you can just keep it right there so i know the spine is not perfectly aligned but i i honestly do not care it works just the same for me every time okay so i'll go back in the front view and now it's time to work on the legs so i'll grab the top of this one and all it actually is helpful if you grab them all in like one piece and move them just so we're not getting any rotational issues so move like that just to put it right below the belt i like to keep them right below the belt where they're gonna move move grab this guy and again you're looking for those three lines that you made in the um actually it's right here these are the three lines that we made with the with the knee so it's going to go right on that middle line just like we did before that's where our kneecap has to go so we'll move that up and then in the front view we'll grab this whole foot section and i just like to put it right at the bottom the sideways button right there at the bottom and go into side view and make sure you pull back a little bit and just just work it around you want to keep a slight bend in the knee just for the ik system for the inverse kinematic system it's going to generate if there's not a slight bend in the knee it's going to get confused and like oh which which way does the knee bend this way or that way so it's sort of like you're like cheating it a little bit one way just to just to tell the computer hey man i know which way to bend so like that's like clearly like it's going to be like got you i know where to bend now so our armature is in the right place now you might be instinctively driven to just go ahead and parent this to the mesh with the good old select the old mesh grab the bones control p automatic weights but that's caveman style and we're not gonna do that we have a couple more steps first and it's not hard so select your rig here and this is your meta rig meta rig is telling you hey this is like generally the meta rig refers to the rig think of it like that think of like a something that's meta it's like referring to something else like this meta rig refers to the real rig that we're about to create so this is basically like we're just drawing guidelines with this rig here so we've put it in place and to specify where it's going we have to do ctrl a apply the scale and apply the location which just like we did with the mesh it basically says okay everything that's here it's really here so now that that's ready this rig is ready to be generated and that's right over here in this tab so over here click on this little walk-in man here and then when you when you add the rig-ify you're gonna get these um three new little drop downs and right under this rigid five buttons it's just generate rig and it's quick and easy as clicking that and there we've built our rig this is our character rig and again the meta rig refers to the character rig so we don't need the meta rig anymore you can hide that get it out of the way heck you can move it out of the collection if you want to and now we have our rig and um i don't know that we named this character but now it's a good time to actually name our character so i'm going to just give this character a name here we're going to call this character simon bam there's no reason why right there's no reason why this character's name simon i just wanted it to be simon this sphere this is referring to our eyes so i will just select this this is again we're now going through we're applying some of the things we've created so drop this mirror down hit apply so grab these ears i'll apply the mirror modifier that way cool all right and we can rename these ears and we can rename the sphere's eyes so we have simon eyes and ears and that's the only portions of our characters that we actually actually have so we have our actual rig here um this is a good time to name this rig so this is 7 rig now the part we've been waiting for you can just select your character select the rig so that way the rig is the active object control p now we can hit it with the old automatic weights and it was quick and simple and if you do control tab on your keyboard with the rig selected you're in a pose mode and you can move around and your character is rigged how they should be automatically with ik so you're gonna have all these these constraints build up and now you're gonna realize the eyes and the ears aren't part of it um but the quick and easy way to just get around that is just right away grab your ears grab your eyes then grab the rig control tab go into pose mode select this top head here so now you have both the eyes the ears selected and then the active object is the rig and inside the ring you selected the head specifically now you can do ctrl p and apply what you have to that bone so now if we move this top bone around it will move with it so let's look in here in material view if we move this thing around we have the head applied and the arm applied this guy applied so everything is in place awesome okay now i will just select everything alt r alt g which just says clear rotation clear the position and we are good okay so i'll go into object mode again so a couple more things i will um if you didn't watch my tutorial on applying shape keys as the as facial expressions um click here to watch it because it's actually um the quickest easiest way if you want to just have some quick expressions but i'm just going to run through that really quick here and i'm not going to use bones this time so i'm just going to hit add add a basis key so basically this is saying hey everything here um this is the base mesh so we're going to deform off of this i'm going to add another one this is going to be our first deformation and what's that going to be well i'm going to call this mouth closed and i'm just going to tab into edit mode with mouth closed selected and i'm just going to throw everything into a nice little closed position okay so i did that now if i drag the slider up the mouth closes it opens let's add another one this will be our blink and likewise what we did before we can just i'm going to grab these two here and i'm just going to pull them down and sort of rotate them into position same thing with this side here that's our blank now let's just watch it through to make sure nothing clips perfect okay so our blank is there um a newer method of of doing this and adding bones is just adding custom properties and it's super quick and easy so this is this is good to do this directly on the character so i will select our character mesh and then under the object tab here we have this title called custom properties which you're probably like what is this one what do you mean what's a custom property well this is basically all these over here are properties that um are added by default by blender basically things on this side are properties and most of them are added in by blender by default but you can add your own in and they can they can control drivers which is the coolest thing we can do so i will add a custom property and i will edit it and i will call this property mouth closed and then the property value i will say is one the default value can be zero and min 0 max 1. if you use soft limits this allows you to go outside of one but really we don't want this selected because it's either zero or one the mouth is either not closed or it's closed there's no two there's no negative one it's zero or one and you also wanna select this is over is library overrideable this is going to allow you to use this when your character is outside of this blender scene so for example when we import our character in or when we when we link our character to the scene this allows you to use this property in the library so i will just hit okay and now it you'll see it right under the properties mouth close zero or one and what's quick and easy is you can find you can navigate the whole way down here and and grab this guy and you know change the value like this which is kind of a pain if you're animating so the easier method would be having this custom property where you have mouth closed and if you change this value it will affect that and we're going to do that with the driver and you might be rolling your eyes oh drivers watch how easy this is this sometimes drivers are as simple as this i'm going to right click on this i'm going to say copy as new driver i'm going to go over to my mouth closed and the value i'm going to right click and i'm going to hit paste driver literally now i can just drag this left and right now this thing directly affects the mouth being closed now we can do the exact same thing with the blink right i'm going to add a new one i'm going to edit this property this is going to be blink the property value is one default value i'll make this zero and we again we don't want soft limits we don't want this going below zero or above one or above one this is going to be overrideable and then if i you can also add a little tool tip here so this is like if you hover over it'll tell you what it does we'll just say um controls and you don't have to do this but say you're making this rig for someone else and there's not and the property is not as straightforward as blink it can be it can be pretty obscure you can have as many of these as you want right you can just give it a little more detail this controls the blank okay and now look we have another one here which i will right click copy as a new driver with this with our character here go back into the vertex groups or this object data's property and go down to shape keys and find blank click on that right click on the value and paste that driver in there and now our blank is being controlled by this one so our character now is fully rigged up and with a little bit of cleanup here so we can add a new collection so let's go ahead and save this character so ctrl s save i will add a new collection we will call this simon that's all we need to know this character is simon what should be in simon well i like to just make sure everything's that's in simon is there so i like to turn simon off first and then i just start moving things into the ob into the collection until there's nothing left that we need so i will move this into simon and see why this is helpful because you might forget something and you might forget to add something into the collection this way as long as you start moving things grab the body move to simon oh look we forgot about the eyes those also need to be in simon move simon move the ears to simon now i can just turn simon back on and everything in simon is what we'll need for controlling simon so perfect we've created our character good work you got this far we've completely created a character now if i save this let's go into a scene okay so we've loaded up a little scene here and it's time to bring in our character so because you've created this whole character file um it's as easy as just referencing that file so you'll go to file link you'll find the directory where you've created your character and then you will double click on it and then find the collection you just select that character's name because it's gonna be a bunch of other stuff like widgets and collection that you don't necessarily need and you can link that character in and there's our character right over here and our characters fully ready to go now you can see there's not much you can do with it because it's just like you can't go into animal there's nothing it's just linked right so um what we can do then is with our character we're like okay i'm ready to actually use it so we're going to override this character so object go to relations and make a library override now do you remember that slider that we selected um with the custom properties this is make library override that basically allows you to use those things in this situation so if i select this character now under properties he's still going to have these custom properties built in that we can control now we have our character's armature here that you can just go into pose mode and just drag it around and animate your character now that it's all rigged up and ready to go so yeah i'm not going to go over teaching how to animate in this tutorial because that's out of the scope with the tutorial this tutorial is how to make a character for animation and here we've uh we've created our full character maybe this looks a little bit more like t-rex style thing here but uh you get the point right our characters our characters rigged and ready to go we can control all these different aspects a little blink action hey how's it going hey hey see look if you don't just want to play with the character like an action figure once you're done then restart because you're not having enough fun so yeah thanks for watching drop a comment let me know how this worked out for you and uh also if you are following along with me share your characters over with me on instagram here's my at just feel free to dm me your characters i love i love seeing the work you guys create and it's really cool um feel free to drop your questions down in the comments and i'll uh i'll try to get back to you so again thanks for watching and uh hope this helps you out you

Channel: FruitZeus

Views: 8,116

Keywords: How To Rig Easy Blender, How To Rig A Simple Character, Create A Stylized Character Rig, Character Creation Tutorial Blender 2.91, How To Rig A Character Blender 2.91, How To Rig A Character Blender 2.9, Blender 2.91 Tutorial

Id: j1fPwvmysZo

Length: 19min 37sec (1177 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021