Facial Rigging with Bendy Bones

Vince Russell from get good with Vince here with a blender video on creating a facial rig using bendy bones first things first acknowledgments are in order this method of rigging did not originate with me that distinction belongs to a brilliant blender artist and technician named Daniel Lera Daniel has posted some absolutely fantastic videos on using bendy bones on Vimeo I'll include links to his videos in the description below you really need to check those out all right let's get started with our own rig now in his video he uses a tool to facilitate creating bendy bones with controllers very quickly I couldn't get that plug into work and blender 2.8 so I wrote my own you'll find it attached in the description below as well just install that before you get started once installed you'll find it under the tools palette in the sidebar ok let's speed things up you know this next part create an armature add some bones place them in strategic locations now where you place bones for your bendy rig is gonna be quite different from where you would place them in a conventional rig you don't have to copy mine exactly take a look at Daniels videos and see where he places his bones to get a good idea of how to place yours something I learned after creating this facial rig which by the way is my very first one is that it's very important to figure out what parts of the face will move or says which parts are rigid that really makes a difference as to where you will place your bones now you'll notice that we put straight bones across areas that are going to be curved take a look we simply add segments to our bendy bone and then use the in-and-out controls to bend it to the shape that we want super easy super convenient so after you've made your initial placement of your bones go around the rig and make these adjustments so that the bendy bones conform to the shape of your mesh so we've moved a bit forward in time we've got a few more bones here but notice how most of them are conforming to our mesh they're curved to the shape of the topology that they are set to influence you may also notice that we're working in a way that's familiar we were only rigging one side of the mesh in order to eliminate doing twice the amount of work when we can automate that part speaking of which notice our naming convention we've created all these bones on the left side of our mesh so we have appended each one of the bone names with a dot capital L now if you feel more comfortable working on the right side you can do that with a dot capital R as well but this will be very important when we use our script to automate the creation of control bones for our bendy bones and also when we mirror the mesh to copy the bones to the opposite side now we're gonna start having some fun we're gonna add control bones for our bendy bones make sure that your armature is in edit mode select a single bone and then go to your panel with your control bones creator add-on click the add control bones button and you'll notice that there are two control bones added to the selected been deboned depending on the scale of your seen the new bones will be either too large or too small you can simply use the panel here at the bottom of the screen that's popped up to adjust them blender will remember the size you set the next time you add control bones the new control bones display has also been set to a custom object an empty that's been added to the scene now I'm not a very good Python programmer in fact I learned Python just to create this plug-in this add-on so it's not very flexible but it gets the job done some limitations are you have to be in edit mode and then you also have to select only one bone at a time I hope to change that in the future as my Python skills improve but for now I guess it'll do so as we observe in the video you go through each bone that you want to add controls for you simply select it click the button test them out and make sure they're doing what you want now it's time to mirror the bones to the opposite side pick all the bones that you want to mirror including the control bones that's very important then use blenders armatures symmetrize command in order to copy the bones with the controls to the other side of the mesh now we can see why that naming convention was so important especially with regard to creating control bones you see as I meant not a very skilled Python programmer all the script does is looks for a period or a dot in the name of the bone and then it appends an underscore end or underscore start to designate which control bone it is and then it takes that ending after the dot and tacks it back on so let's say the bone you're adding controls to is named ear dot L once you add the control bones they'll be named ear underscore start dot L and ear underscore end dot L blender will then understand these endings and allow you to automatically mirror all of these balloons to the other side of your mesh using the armature symmetrized command so it's very important that you name your bones using a period before designating which side it's on now you can say dot left dot right r dot L doesn't matter as long as you do it with a period or a dot and no other character now for the part where this all pays off binding your mesh to your armature so select your mesh select your armature hit command P or ctrl P and pick parent with automatic weights I was really surprised at how great the initial bind was usually these items take a lot of cleanup and it did take some cleanup but the initial deformation of the mesh was fantastic you know some of the items are weighted a little too heavily as you can see the scalp the hair moving too much of the eye the flesh above the eyes moving but for an initial bind with a rig that takes less than an hour to create this is absolutely amazing so I highly recommend this method of rigging it's super easy pretty intuitive and yields some pretty impressive results right from the start something else I learned is it takes a bit of practice to learn exactly where you should place the initial bones as well as the control bones watch daniel's videos experiment a bit and you'll find the best ways to place these bones and/or to deform your mesh accurately so after a nightmarish time trying to learn how to use blenders tools to adjust the weighting on this character I ended up with this it's nowhere near professional level but for a very first rig and animation of a character facial break an animation of a character I think it's pretty good and I think it isn't it's a testament to just how easy it is to work with bendy bones so once again all credit to Daniel Lara thank you so much for posting those videos they've taught me quite a bit look for the links in the description as I mentioned a longer version of this video will be available on my patreon in the near future so you might want to check that out just want to say thank you for joining me on this journey I hope it helps you and your journey to get good see you next time [Music]

Channel: Get Good! with Vince

Views: 58,814

Keywords: Blender, rigging, bendy bones, 3d, 3d animation

Id: zZ63h8o6t9Q

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019