EVERYTHING you need to know to Hard Surface Rigging in Blender

so in the video today we're going to be setting up this rig with pistons and it's all armatured and oh my goodness so we're going to be using the 20 landing gear set by Michael Thomas um pretty good set let's rig it well one of them so let's have a look I've already rigged up this leg here one of the important things that I've done if I go into pose mode is that I've renamed all the bones I don't know what you want to look and so in total we've got our root main upper lower foot however we want to rig these pistons and we also want to give it a bit of ik love if you know what I'm saying first things first we're going to go into edit mode or actually let's take a step back I actually know why we're here I'm going to go shift a and add in a brand new bone I'm actually going to come to the point where the other side of the rotation will be so if I come down to here shift s curse to selected come back into our Armature select that shift s selection to cursor then select the tail shift s curse to selected and then I'm just going to scale that back now I want to create that secondary bone down here so let's go back into edit mode shift s curse to selected tab to go back into object mode select the Armature tab to go back in shift a up here shift s cursor to selected shift s selection to cursor let's bring the cursor back down here scale it down there we go so now we've got both ends of this piston and I'm going to call this piston here piston one so let's rename our bones to make our life super easy bone piston one upper piston one underscore lower now at the moment these bones don't have any relation so if we're going to pose mode and know where to rotate this rotate this you can see how they're not following anything cool let's fix that select all alt R and ALT Gene will reset the rotation and location back into edit mode I'm going to select our upper bone let's go into relations and the parent here will be lower so now when we go into pose mode it'll copy that rotation lovely back in edit mode Let's select this bone here the parent will be foot so when we come into here pose mode rotate excellent now I'm just going to do the same on this piston as well so just give me a sec and now into pose mode we can see that we've got piston to lower piston load upper let's just quickly assign it to our bone so this one here will be assigned to Upper so let's select this bone upper U are going to be selected to lower because that's this bonus attached to that bone there lower so pose mode Let's do a quick check yep no worry sunshine yep no worries sunshine yep no worries sunshine now let's attach the mesh to the Armature so I'm going to left click on the mesh shift left click on the Armature control P to parent and I want to parent with empty groups so now when we select our mesh and we come into the vertex groups we can see our bones so now we can start going through the mesh and assigning it to our bones so if we go into edit mode um now at the moment because there's a lot of edge splits if I were to select this mesh here Ctrl L you can see how it's not selected everything it did select everything Ah that's why but if I were to come here and go control L you can see even though these meshes are joined it's not highlighting everything now that's a feature of blender it's a really important feature but if you want to get around it just go into the vertex selection mode by pressing one and now I can press Ctrl and select everything that's linked now I've got a little tip anyway back to this Ctrl L we've got this section up here this is going to be assigned to my main and now what I'm going to do to make my life easier is just hide to get rid of it let's now go ahead live let's now go ahead and select that is that everything we want to select yes so I'm going to have that as my upper hide this here control L is definitely not what I wanted so we can see that these are one mesh so let's go ahead and fix that I'm going to select that edge Loop there V to rip and we know I've got that top piston which is what we want I'm going to press F to do a face and E to extrude not too much probably about there lovely job lease now I can go ahead and select that Ctrl L this will be assigned to our piston 2 upper hide now technically this isn't rotating down here but uh to make my life easier it is going to be rotating and I'm going to select this one as piston to lower assign and hide now these pieces here Ctrl L this is going to be our lower hide select all that control L you can see that we select everything that's linked that's not what we want so let's go ahead and fix that up luckily enough I can just go ahead and delete those faces right there let's select all this again Ctrl L this is piston one upper assign hide U control l piston one lower hide and then the rest of you buddy you are foot so let's now go alt H to unhide everything everything's come back this is now just going to be a test to see if it works let's select our Armature pose mode rotate oops R to rotate excellent excellent excellent cool awesome now let's do some of the special stuff from here I'm going to select this bone here and we're going to go into the bone constraints not the constraints object constraints we're going to the Bone constraints add bone constraint dampen track and I'm going to select this one which is the only Armature and this would be piston to lower and we'll do the same for this one bang constraints dampen track Armature bone piston to Upper so what is Marco just done well if I rotate now you can see that we've got a piston obviously we've got a problem where the Piston's not long enough uh the Piston will probably never actually might be like that one time so let's make kind of like an estimated guess that this is maximum extension so I'm just going to leave it like that so to do that again I'll show you let's select our piston lower piston one upper bone constraint bone constraint dampen track Armature piston one lower this one here is piston one lower dampen track Armature piston one up and then if we go rotate you can see how we've got that now I reckon we can most definitely extend that one so I'm just going to go into object mode and let's select that in there I'm going to press f let's go e to extrude I hate you let's let's press e to extrude that might be a bit too much marker let's bring it back down to there let's just make sure that is assigned to our piston one lower assign let's now go back into object mode back into here back into pose mode and if we rotate you can see freaking sick we've got Pistons look at that how Grouse is that however one step further let us select this bone down here I'm just going to go into a wireframe mode search by pressing spacebar or F3 or FN F3 if you're on a laptop I'm gonna press i k from here we're going to add ik to bone without targets um then I'm going to come to the Bone constraints I'm not going to worry about any of this the chain length is what is the start of the Armature now technically I could go here but you can see how that top platform's rotating so I'm just going to increase the chain length to go one two three there at that point there so now it's all it is all animated delightful yes so that's cool and all however it's not 100 percent so if I just go alt R alt and G to reset the rotation and location let's go into edit mode I'm going to select here shift s cursor to selected actually no shift s because it's selected go shift a to add in a new bone G and I'll put that there just gonna move this off to the side and this will be our knee bone so let's make sure we give that a name knee and I might just call it control here shift a nope let's select that shift s cursor selected shift a and then I'm going to put that puppy in there this bone here whoops this one here is going to be called foot underscore Taral so now when we go into pose mode and we select the bone our foot bone let's come into bone constraints Target will be foot control so the pole angle uh 90. yeah there we go that works and now we have this now that I think about it I shouldn't have done it like this it should actually go on straight down so from here I'm going to actually make this go all the way straight down this one here G Zed to go down to about there now when we go into pose mode I hate you it looks a little bit wonky rotate 90 degrees and then we go now we've got it all sorted and we can control what the leg looks like for some odd reason if we want to rotate the knee we can however I'm pretty sure that the mechanism would break because it's hard surface landing gear but yeah there you go sick

Channel: Markom3D

Views: 6,326

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender rigging, blender tutorial modeling, blender (software), 3d rigging, blender bones, blender tutorial animation, sci fi, rigging in blender, blender beginner tutorial, blender rigging tutorial 2.8, blender tutorial beginner

Id: WqdPD2SQAnk

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023