Easily Rig Simple Objects: Desk Fan (Blender 2.93)

today we're going to take a look at building a custom rig for this tabletop fan right here as well as making some custom animations to make animating it just a little bit easier [Music] so i built this fan here in blender right now i'm an eevee and if you can see all of the parts here are separate these are different objects i have the base here which i've named accordingly a base plate uh this back piece i have this little cage that i put around it and the blades i looked at some reference when i was making this fan so i so i knew kind of generally what fans look like i mean i feel like i have an idea of what a fan looks like but it's always good to look at reference so you know you're making something that looks like reality one helpful trick is sometimes when i'm working i like to turn on random colors and i'm in the solid view as you can see here but if i drop this arrow down over here normally you're on material which is normal but if you switch it to random every time you add a new object to the scene it will just take on a new color only in the viewport this helps you to sort of organize the scene just a little bit so one of the first steps to making a good rig is staying organized and keeping your project file organized using collections in blender is a great way to stay organized so you have this default collection which i like to keep some of the lights in and maybe the ground plane you can just sort of close that to hide some of the stuff that you're not going to use all the time then i always make a collection for for the object i'm making the in this case it's the fan that includes all the different pieces that i've built that are named accordingly and i also have this other collection that i've turned off called cs which is short for custom shapes if i turn this on you can see here i have cs aero fan star we'll look at these a little more later but basically what they mean are these are the custom shapes for our bones so whenever i have an armature it's not just going to be bone it's going to have a custom shape so i'll turn that off for now so back in rendered view here's another look at my model that i've created pretty happy with this little guy you know okay so we have our collections all sorted out i'll just make sure my cursor is back in the center of the world and to do that i will do shift s which brings up this little menu and you get all these little fun options of where to either put the cursor or where to move an object to that cursor in the world space um but you really just want to go with one here cursor to world origin okay so now i know my cursor is back in the center so we'll go back to the solid view here and since my cursor is in the world center i can shift a and we will add a armature and i will select a single bone and that just dropped that right in the center of the world and to help see that a little better if you go over here on the right under this object data properties you have the viewport display options i just click in front and we're already on our way to building the rig for this so the rig for this fan is only going to consist of three bones we're going to have our root bone which is the base plate the the bone to grab the whole object to move it around we're going to have one bone that controls the rotation the left and right of the fan and also a bone that controls the spinning of the fan the actual fan movement again it's important to stay organized so i added a new armature i will hit f2 and i will rename this to fan rig it might seem annoying to be naming all these things all the time but it's so helpful if you have huge files and you have big scenes you have a lot of data in and you know you don't want to be going through armature.001 you know what what rig is this you really need to name all of your stuff especially as you start doing bigger projects you're going to need to know what what data is what data so if we tab into edit mode just like an object you can go into edit mode into your bone now that we're inside the rig we still have to name things this is the bone so as you can see it's fan rig colon bone and this is named bone but i will hit f2 and rename this bone to root and we're already on our way i'm just going to select the top of this bone and i will bring it down just to sort of get it out of the way a little bit so when you hit shift a inside edit mode of an armature it's going to add a bone directly on top of the 3d cursor so it's important to place that 3d cursor where you want the bone to go first especially if it's really important for the bones going to be to put the 3d cursor where it needs to be i'm actually going to go out of edit mode into object mode and i'm going to select the pieces that need to rotate so the next piece it needs to rotate is this back piece right here if i move this around you can see what i have here um but it has to rotate around this central point here because that's obviously how it would move right this is this is sort of the the hole that it sits in so it needs to it needs to rotate from this basin and to do that i'm going to need to have the the bone to sit directly in the center of this which means i'll need to place the 3d cursor there so i can drop a bone so to do that i will go into edit mode of this object and just like we set the cursor to the world origin i can i can um set the cursor to the center of one of these loops here by just holding alt and clicking on that loop make sure you're either in vertex selection or edge selection once you are just holding alt and then left clicking on any of these loops will select the whole ring and once you have that selected we can use our handy shift s menu to drop the cursor to selected so once i click that right there we'll see the cursor is exactly in the center of that and now once i go to object mode the cursor stays in the same place and we can go back into edit mode on our armature and drop in a new bone we only need one more bone and that bone is going to control the fan rotation so let's think where does the 3d cursor need to go for that well we already have a center point here on our fan so since i have the selected i can just shift s cursor to selected and i've put the cursor right in the middle of that fan so now if i go back into edit mode here i can just drop a drop of bone in there and we have it right where it needs to be all right and that's actually all the bones we need for this rig we need three bones and we can start setting up the parent relationships so i like to sort of work from the the top the very end of the rig the whole way back to the root when i'm setting my parents because it's helpful to visualize it that way and it's easy just to think about the flow of things so for example i'll grab the very end here the very end bone and you know this controls the fan and i know and i know that uh this is going to be a child of this bone because when this part moves the fan apparatus will move with it you have to sort of think in that motion for example if my arm moves here if i move my forearm this way all of my hand bones have moved with it based off of the rotation of this now if i move my hand that actually doesn't affect my forearm at all so that's how you know all of these hand bones are going to be a child of this forearm bone and you have to think in that process when you're creating the parents so so we just keep thinking that way so if i were to move this base bone here for the fan it's going to move this rotational arm so i'll grab this back bone here then i'll shift select the root bone hit control p and again keep offset and remember just go through and rename your bones as you see fit they don't have to be perfect but just so you know what they are and f2 does the job f2 backbone fan bone so now that all my parent relations are set up i can actually switch from edit mode to pose mode and if i grab these bones here it's not going to move the mesh just yet but we can see how they how they work so if i move the root everything will move together which that makes sense it should if i were to take this back piece and i rotate that yep that looks right the the front piece will rotate on that on that offset just like that that works perfectly and then this should move independently awesome so now let's go through and actually start attaching some of this mesh directly to the bones and this is where it's all going to come together so because these are all separate objects it's as easy as selecting each individual object and then shift selecting the armature then you have to go to pose mode and then select the bone you want it to be attached to and then control p and attach it to the bone now that order of operations is very important you have to make sure you follow that and you'll know it worked if you're in pose mode and you select the bone you want to move and then you can move it it's attached so we have to go through and attach every piece so i'll go back to object mode and i'll alt a deselect everything and i'll do the next piece in in the puzzle so i'll grab this back part shift select the armature go to pose mode grab the bone it needs to be attached to control p to the bone and now if i move this piece that works if i were to rotate this piece that works it's attached and we just keep going um you can do multiple objects at the same time too which is really handy if you have if you have like an array of objects that just all need to be stuck to one bone you can just shift select them all so i'll grab that piece then i'll shift select my cage here and then i will shift select the armature and then i will go into pose mode here and i will just make sure i have the right bone selected here ctrl p attach that all to the bone now if i rotate this it all moves together and the last thing we have to attach is this fan to the top bone so just go ahead and grab that go back into pose mode ctrl p attach the bone and now it's all attached yay if i move this root bone it works if i move this bone it works um rotate rotate it works awesome so everything's attached um but there's some weird things because like you shouldn't be able to grab and lift that off so easily we also shouldn't be able to rotate that so when you're doing some hard surface rigging like this it's really helpful just to go right in once everything's attached and go over to this bone menu and you have this transform panel that opens up and all these locks are going to be your friend you want to just go through and set and lock everything that shouldn't move so for example all of the location pieces here i should just click and drag and lock all of them because this shouldn't move position right i mean it's stuck to this piece if i want to move this this whole part is going to move um and the root bone obviously should all be unlocked because the root bone has no limitations it can move in any way it wants to i mean it's the root bone it's the ultimate the final destination root bone you know what i'm trying to say so any way that the root bone moves the whole rig can move so you just work up the chain and you decide what which ways uh can't certain bones move it's helpful just to go here and just drag these around so this one i will leave this i will lock that one x rotation well it shouldn't rotate that way set that back to zero lock that one wire rotation aha this is the one we want to leave open so i'll just set that back to zero and then yep lock z so that way i just know if i just grab this at any random angle and start moving it with g it's only going to bend in the proper way and that's what i like to do that's what we like to see rigs that just move in the way they're supposed to now this last bone is going to work very similarly to this bone in which it only has one axis to move upon and we can just go through here and start checking those out so again it's not going to move at all so we can lock all those locations and the rotations we can just start playing with them to see which ones we want okay not that one so we can lock these two the y not that one lock that z yep that's the one z is the one we want to move it on this bone is special because of the way it's going to move you can see when i move z up to 1 it moves 90 degrees around the bend and you would think that's weird it should be 90 degrees well that's because it's set for this quaternion wxyz and uh that's really basically just doing like a sine readout right like sine or cosine will give you values of 0 or 1 when it's at 90 degrees so that that kind of thing is is the readout you're getting we really want to change this to xyz euler so that way we have a full 90 degrees and this will make more sense once we go to start animating the thing because you really want to have the the full range of motion if you want to keep spinning and spinning and spinning so our simple object our fan here is fully rigged it's ready to be animated but the last thing i like to give it is these custom shapes i referenced in the beginning because it's pretty traditional to have custom shapes on a rig and you know sometimes all all this can get clunky and a little bit ugly so if you make if you go the extra mile and make the custom shapes it really it really adds a level of professionalism especially if you make a rig for someone like they're going to be really impressed look at those custom shapes on that man like they you know what i mean like it's they're going to be they're going to be impressed like that's that's the thing to do add some custom shapes so let's take a look at these custom shapes here i'll turn the fan off for now i'll turn off this collection too and i'll look at these custom shapes here which ones do i have so just go down through cs arrow so really these custom shapes are they're just they're literally just mesh data without without any faces uh so basically you can think of them like lines they're just like arrows pointing and you you make these shapes out of simple mesh stuff where you get like a circle and you know that that could be a custom shape if you wanted it to let's take a look at the cs fan here this is the shape i used to to indicate the the fan and the cs star is the shape i use for the root bone so they sort of help to guide the bones so let's bring it back for a second let's take a look so if i were to grab my armature and go into pose mode here i can select my individual bones so i'll start with the root and then view port display just scroll down to custom shape it might be hidden for you just drop that down and custom shape object the reason i i named them so is because it's very easy to just type in cs underscore and then all your custom shapes pop up in this case it's pretty it's pretty traditional to use the star shape here for the root and there that shape has now taken over as the custom shape for that bone and i can just go through all of these here uh this backbone here i will just type in cs and i use cs arrow for this one and you can see it's right there cool this one here cs fan you can uncheck the scale to bone length and it will keep them the original size which i might actually do anyway keep in mind mine fell right into place but nine times out of ten your custom shapes are going to be all over the place so you have to just sort of battle that process so for example you'll have to find your custom shape go into edit mode and then move it around in edit mode to sort of like get it placed where it needs to be in the scene sometimes it can be a pain but it ends up being worth it if you just just give it that extra little bit of love one other thing is these shapes usually are like rotated so that's why it's not a 90 degree angle you so you'll make your custom shape right and then you'll go to apply it and it'll be sideways so you'll be like what the heck so just you know go find your custom shape click on it there and then rotate it 90 degrees and then enter and then it's just going to look like that but you turn it off and then it fits nicely so now your fans really coming together right if i go into my render view here and now i switch to pose mode i can select these shapes here and i can rotate them where i can move them in the ways that they need to move so man that's cool right that that looks professional now [Music] all right so our rig is made and it's time to start animating this guy so so you want to animate the the fan motion you can just hit i and drop a rotation and then hit play go a little bit down the timeline and then rotate it a little bit and then drop a rotation in there now since this fan is going to rotate indefinitely or as long as the fan is turned on it's just important to set those two keyframes select all of them and with all selected you can hit shift e to bring up this keyframe extrapolation menu and just set it for a linear extrapolation which basically just keeps everything moving in the same direction forever grab this this last keyframe here and you can you can move it around and this will set the speed of your uh of your fans motion so the more intense the slope of this line uh the faster it will spin so i'll just move it way down and that's spinning pretty fast now so maybe you want to add a little rotation where this thing spins left and right right and see how that sticks to the location that's because the parent is proper so i'll do something slightly different here i'll drop a keyframe in the rotation on this guy okay so we can find the axis that this will rotate on um again this one is actually still set for quaternion so as you can see if i were to try to like rotate this thing um really far it'll sort of get stuck at the poles and snap that's because it's just it's not going to go past one or negative one i mean for this bone it works you can change that to x y z euler if you'd like so i will find the bone that's going to spin so not the w yeah it's going to be this y quaternion rotation so what that one's selected i will add a function here and then if i hit play you can see it's going crazy but we you have these variables here to dial this in so i can change my amplitude to like 0.035 just something something smaller actually maybe i do want that higher yeah yeah and i want to change the phase multiplier to low 0.035 now it's very slow so it makes it makes this spin feel a lot more natural but just keep in mind that amplitude is how far it's going to go it's the extremes of the bend and multiplier the phase multiplier is basically the speed how fast is it cooking up here okay this is all cool let's take it one step further [Music] this is a cool little technique so i'm actually going to delete the rotation here on this i'm going to delete the all the keyframes on this backbone and on this on this bottom root okay so the only keyframe data is on this bone here which is cool um because that's all we want so if i have just this rotating here i can change this graph editor to the dope sheet but you can change it to action editor and then you have here what says fan rig action and this is just the current action or working on i'm going to change this name here to fan spinning and i will i will save this user in here so that way i know the data block's not going to get lost so that's saved in here that's cool i can actually hit x on this and now if i hit play nothing's happening right now because i i took away that animation um but because i saved it it's actually still here i can just fan spinning and right there right but i want to work on a different animation now so i'll do a new animation i'll call this animation oscillation how do you spell oscillate i don't look like an idiot on youtube it was two l's you dummy okay oscillation cool so now i can make an oscillation animation so this one is the oscillation so if i go back into my graph editor as you can see now there's no animations here and that's because we have a new we have like a new sequence pretty much for animation so it's a clean slate so i will hit i and add a rotation there and i'll drop this down and i remember from before it's our y quaternion if i grab that and i add a built-in function if i hit play we can just get those numbers right again it's 0.25 and then the phase multiplier was 0.5 let's go even more 0.035 and yeah that that will just that will get the job done okay so this is my oscillation animation cool so why do i break them apart like that well you know maybe you don't want your fan spinning indefinitely maybe maybe your fan turns off and on throughout the scene but you still want to spin indefinitely and work or you want you know you want to control these things independently this is how you do it so i'll go back here to the dope sheet and i have this oscillation i will also save this as a fake user and basically again that's just saving the data in a data block so blender won't forget it if either blender crashes or it's in a new scene the data is here if you save it so now that it's here i can i can exit out i'll close it out so everything is empty again i'll grab all my bones here and just give a little alt r alt g just reset everything and alt r resets the rotation alt g location um etc if i go down to nonlinear animation here we have the fan rig and now we can start crafting an animation and here's where it gets fun so you might have an nla track or not if you do or you don't you can just hit shift a over this no actions and it will add a track you can add as many as you want sometimes it's helpful just to have a couple here to work with selecting them is where you sort of arm them for recording almost so let's start with an oscillation so i'll select the very bottom one and i will hit shift a just like in the object mode where you can add stuff i'll shift a and i can add in some of these animations we made so add an oscillation in there and as you can see if i zoom in it's only one frame long just um and that's weird like why is this not working well it's because blender looks at all the keyframes and it says where's the first one and where's the last one and because this one we only had one keyframe but the whole thing is actually just um a procedural animation it sort of like looks past that and it's like uh there's only one key frame here but there's a way to get around that you just select your your track here and you go under strip and you got to scroll all the way down under the action clip and then you can see start and end frame don't mess with these because this basically just like shrinks and and this like shrinks and expands the that like what's actually there and right now what's actually there is only one frame of data so you want to go down to the action clip it's always the the bottom one and just drag this guy out so as i drag this out if i hit play you're basically just overriding this and saying to blender oh no actually it is longer than that so you know you can make this however long this is going to oscillate for so say it oscillates for 80 frames if i go back to the beginning here and i hit play it's going to start oscillating and then it's going to stop because maybe at frame 80 your character decided um i'm going to stop that oscillation for whatever reason hey maybe it's actually frame 112. the world's your oyster right so now what's cool is we can even stack these so let's actually let it oscillate the entire time so i'm going to let it go to from 250 so it is just going to be oscillating the entire time now if i grab my next track above it i can go to frame 50 here or wherever i want and if i hit shift a i can add in a fan spinning and now the fan is going to spin and what's cool about this is the fan spins independently from the oscillation so that way i can say um let me just re-time the fan spinning or let me re-time the oscillation um it's all sort of independent but that's not even the coolest part okay the coolest part is the ability to start and stop your fan right so i'm gonna grab my fan spinning here and go down to this end mark and let's say it spins for i don't know 70 frames if i were to duplicate this and bring it over here i can hit play and my fan is going to spin and it stops and then it starts spinning again there is a little glitch here where if you go and it stops it sort of takes a step back and the reason it does that is because it starts this animation from the beginning of the timeline but because we have hold forward set here on this one this is going to hit the last frame and say okay this is the this is the current state of that bone and now this the next animation is going to is going to use this blending mode and it's going to say oh i need to replace that animation of that bone but really if you just change this to add this is going to add those values on top of what's already there so what i'm trying to get at is you can you can have it going here going going going it stops and then it picks up from where it was left off before and it continues just because it just adds it from before right say it was at zero the fan was spinning and it got to like i don't know say it got to 400 degrees like you know in a circle not fahrenheit it got to 400 degrees of like a little little over a full turn and then it stops it's not going to start back at 0 degrees it's going to start at 400 degrees and then go up to 800 degrees so it actually is super helpful to sort of like time these out so there you have it you have the rig you have the fan you learned how to make custom shapes you learned how you learned a little bit about parenting and we got a little bit into the non-linear editor here so using these techniques you can build some really cool rigs that aren't just for hard surface you know you can use the same techniques to to build characters too which we're definitely going to get into here on this channel so i thank you for watching i hope you subscribe and leave a comment and let me know if there's anything else you want to look into here because i'm very excited about these new tool sets here in blender and we're just going to keep diving deeper into them so until next time take care

Channel: FruitZeus

Views: 615

Keywords: How To Rig In Blender 2.93, Blender 2.93 Rigging Tutorial, Blender Rigging Tutorial, Rig Objects In Blender, How To Rig Simple Objects, Rig Simple Objects Blender 2.93, How To Rig A Fan In Blender, Rig A Desk Fan Blender 2.93, Blender Desk Fan, How To Animate Desk Fan Blender 2.93, Blender 2.93 NLA Editor, Blender Object Animation, FruitZeus Tutorial, Simple Objects In Blender

Id: sgfx-jHKT7Y

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021