EASY and QUICK Character Rigging in Blender - Blender Basics Tutorial

so you want to rig up your character inside of blender you've made something but now you want it to be able to move of course you do so today we're going to go over two very quick ways to do that the first one is very quick and easy it's going to be using the rigofy add-on in case you don't yet have it enabled go to edit preferences add-ons and just type into this little search box uh rigify you can enable this and that's everything you need to do once that is enabled uh using shift and a or whatever shortcut you have set for it obviously you can add a new armature basic and either human or quadruped if you're doing a dog or a cat or some kind of animal you're going to use a quarter pad because it's got four legs basic human is uh just what you expected to eat it's a basic human so you scale that up to roughly fit with your mesh then go into the right hand side over here we go to viewport display and choose in front this way the bones will always be in front of your mesh so they won't like get lost inside of it and from here you just highlight the meta rig and you go to edit mode and you try to line up the bones as best you can it doesn't have to be very exact but you probably want it to be at least somewhat accurate so let me do this real quick and i'll get back to you once i have everything rigged up now that way if everything lined up more or less again it doesn't have to be very exact necessarily but you probably want things to look at least like they are overlapping uh decently well you go back to this panel over here the same panel we just used to have our bones show up in front of the mesh and after applying the skill which you do by pressing ctrl a and then all transforms i'll show you in a moment why that is important you press generate rig and this will automatically generate a control rig for you and congratulations you've just rigged the character now if we go back a couple of steps and we do not apply the scale and we generate a rig you will see that the rig generates very very small because it uh it's using the non-scaled-up version of the bones highlight the object first and then the rig this is an important step uh order you press ctrl and p to parent and you parent with automatic weights usually automatic weights are pretty good these days you might have to wait paint things manually a little bit that's the whole of the video though uh so now that things are parented selecting the rig here we can actually just hide the uh bones because we don't need those anymore going into pose mode you'll be able to see that uh we can move things about and the character is entirely rigged automatically with inverse kinematics as well that is really the main reason that i would recommend anytime you can use this to use this because it's literally as easy as just lining things up and you've got a full working ik rig and that's everything you need to do for most human characters you're going to rig but say you have something that is not human something weird um alien like this obviously a mata rig isn't going to work for this rigafy isn't to work here so let's go over the process of making a custom rig real quick so let me disable this and enable the base mesh from there we can go add shift a we go armature single bone now there's no bones remember we have to go to object data properties viewport display and name enable in front now we can see our bone i'm going to keep this bone in the middle here i'm going to rotate it downward lift it up and from there it's really just a matter of having the bones roughly follow the mesh the parts where you want to move it around anyway so the way you do that is again you go into edit mode you move around this little thing here from there we can go e to extrude y to lock to the y axis and pull it out but i don't want a second bone here at the moment could be useful but at the moment i really don't want that so what we will do is we'll go clear parent by pressing alt and p as you can see here and then we will put the bone where we want it to be so i want it to be over at this tentacle and we turn it around a little we need to raise it up a little bit and this is a little finicky uh you do need to be constantly changing perspective to make sure that things are lined up properly if you try to rig the entire thing from just one perspective i guarantee to you it's not going to work out too well we need to reconnect it to this bow so what we do is we select the bone that we want to parent first then secondly we select the bone that we want to parent to pressing control p and choosing keep offset you will see a little dotted line connecting the two of them meaning that if i now move this one in pose mode uh that is the other one will move with it from here back in edit mode it's really as easy as just e to extrude shift z to lock to the axis i want it and just making a couple of extra bones uh do that for every single tentacle and then obviously sometimes you have to uh fine-tune and tweak things a little bit if you do that for every single tentacle here you will end up with a rig a little something more like this one uh which does have ik controllers on it as well that's a little beyond the scope of this video right now we will make a separate video about ik just remember if you want very easily building inverse kinematics and you have something that looks like a dog or a cat or a human just use riggify it's a really powerful tool and it's all you'll pretty much need for 90 of your models most likely if you want custom inverse kinematics we'll talk about that next time

Channel: The Game Dev Cave

Views: 166,192

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender basics, blender rigging, rigify, blender IK rig, blender inverse kinimatics, blender animation, animation rig, character rig, blender bones, blender armature

Id: vzJ7454X46g

Length: 6min 50sec (410 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 04 2022