How to Create, Rig & Animate a Low Poly Rabbit

in this video I'll show you a detailed breakdown of how to make a game character from scratch with animated actions ready for your game engine if you have a reasonable understanding of blender you can actually follow along but I do go fairly quickly as it's meant as an overview of the techniques and processes involved if you want a really in-depth detailed version of how to make a low poly animal then check the link in the description the rabbit is to celebrate Chinese New Year and as a gift to you you can download The Finnish rabbit file with actions and use it in your games if you like also if you like what I do then you can get some wonderfully priced courses and other great content on this channel links and discount codes are in the description also a big thank you to Nvidia and PC specialist for sponsoring this video so let's dive in and make a rabbit [Music] so the first thing to do is drag the background images in there's the background image if you want to screen grab or you can download it with the link in the description then I line up the background image so there's one in the back and one on the side and I use the object data properties over on the right hand side and I change the opacity so I have that ticked and I change it to about 0.2 so it's not too glaring the side and the front view of the rabbit are lined up so you just have to duplicate it make sure you get the same height and then move it into position from here we're ready to start modeling [Music] now I do have a separate video for going through the whole process of creating a low poly animal and it's worth checking that out if you want a more detailed guide again links in the description but I'd like to start off with a plane and then I line that up with the side view then I jump into edit mode so I can start changing the position of the vertices what I'm trying to do is match up the curves of the shape to the structure of my plane so for example I add a loop cut down the middle here so there's more of a curve and start moving those vertices into position the other option is to select a couple of vertices and extrude them out with E and we're just going to trace around the body for the moment now you're not going to perfectly match up with the Curve but this is the sort of resolution as it were that you want to keep so I've not got too many polygons that makes the whole process a lot easier and we can just add more polygons as we go along and there we have our body [Music] the next part is then to mirror this shape and kind of add bulk to it this can be a bit confusing for beginners but take note of where the object origin is at the moment that's the orange dot just there that's where all our mirroring is going to happen around so I jump into front view and with everything selected I move it across the side notice that our object origin doesn't move that's important because that's where we're mirroring around then I can go across the modifiers add the mirror modifier initially that will look a bit weird but that's because we need to set our rotation it's currently mirroring in the wrong direction that's because it's looking at the local x-axis instead of the global x-axis that's good but that does mean I have to press Ctrl a and apply any rotation that I've made on my object then you can see it's mirrored along the x-axis which is what we want if you have any problems you can move the origin point which is where it's mirroring around if all this is getting very confusing then do check out my video on the mirror modifier links in the description but now what I need to do is go back into edit mode select all the outside edges and then extrude them towards the center now you'll notice it overlaps itself so you need to turn on clipping so it sticks in the middle and there you can see we've got a kind of Base body for our rabbit [Music] now in order to do the legs I do a loop cut down the middle and then I move the position of that Loop cut so it kind of matches up with the legs of my rabbet then for the back leg I select those faces where I outline the leg and bring them out so it's in line with the front view leg and I repeat that process for the front leg point it looks very blocky so I select the top Edge and then I Edge slide it with GG double tap G and you can kind of edge that along one way and along the other and it kind of rounds it out I need to do that same process for the bottom of the rabbet so I select the bottom of the legs and pull those upwards and then the same with the neck and the chin and it's just a case of edge sliding those edges along a bit so they round out then I can select the outside faces and scale them in so the leg kind of has more curve to it and at this point the rabbit's a bit more rounded I can go to side view again and start extruding out the legs so it matches up with the background again I don't do lots of extrusions I just do a couple to make sure it matches up with the shape and I can always add some Loop Cuts in and add detail later remember to go around to front view and make sure it's matching up there looks a little bit like a dinosaur at the moment but we'll get there then across the front leg and you might want to go into x-ray view so you can see the background image and start extruding out once again and again jump across the front view to make sure they're in position just make sure you have all the bottom faces selected when you do that so you don't look like an idiot like I am here don't panic that it's still looking a bit blocky as we can sort that out later foreign for that I need to select the back faces so I can hide them with h and then it's much easier to work on the front where the faces are because I can be in x-ray mode to see the background but I don't have all the faces of the body distracting me for the cheeks I actually select those side faces and extrude them out this is probably the toughest part of the whole model is trying to figure out the faces you need and where to put them my advice to beginners is just start adding faces cutting bits in with the knife tool and maybe adding some Loop Cuts just note on that if you add a loop cut whilst the rest of the mesh is hidden it won't go through the rest of the mesh that is hidden so it only goes part of the way that's absolutely fine you end up with some mangons you can sort those out later I think probably the best tool is the knife tool because you can just start adding in topology and trying to make the shape up as best you can it takes a bit of practice you might end up with a messy mesh but it's really important to just get going and learn from your mistakes so as I was saying you've got the knife tool so press k for knife and you can just start cutting into your mesh try your best to stick to edges and vertices rather than just cutting into the middle of a face there's different techniques for keeping things to quads but it's a little bit complicated for this tutorial but you can kind of see what I've done here don't panic if you end up with lots of n-gons it really isn't that important as you get more experience you can figure these things out and make it a quad-based mesh every now and again you'll want to check your background image so jump from x-ray view to solid mode and adapt your shape accordingly another handy tool is called the smooth vertex tool and you can find that in the vertex menu just select lots of vertices and then press the smooth vertex button and it kind of Smooths them out and it rounds them out as well another tip is not to add too many faces the more faces you have the more tricky it is to change around your mesh as it gets more and more detailed try your best to work with what you have and then if you feel you just can't get anything from it that's when you start adding some faces in by using those tools I just mentioned and slowly but surely you can see the face emerging here when it comes to something like the eyes or the ears select the faces around the eye and inset them and you'll create some extra faces that you can kind of build a shape around you'll see me do the same thing for the ears in a moment so again you select the faces around that area and eye to inset and then you've got some faces you can extrude outwards and play with the ears are fairly straightforward you just extrude out until you've got the rough shape and then just manipulate the topology I did three Loop Cuts so three extrusions that's just in case you wanted to animate the ears at all and I did put three bones in there as well in case that was the case and at this point it's just a case of moving the mesh around and adjusting things looking at background images looking at perhaps reference images as well to see what different ears look like from different angles you'll see I think I jump back to the head and back to the ears and adjust things and adapt them as I see fit again this often comes down to practice having a sort of artistic eye to be fair it's just being kind of observant to what's there in the shapes of rabbits when you look at your reference images and again slowly the shape of the head is taking shape foreign detailed head we need to go back to the body so alt H to unhide or make visible the hidden objects and then I add a few Loop Cuts once again to give me more topology to play with again not too much we don't want to go too detailed too early if you've added lots of loop cuts for the head then you might want to match things up a bit here or dissolve edges if you want to again don't panic too much if you've got n-gons I'll try and tidy them up as best I can but again I've got a little bit more experience than the average beginner again I'm jumping to and from x-ray mode so I can see the background image and match it up but I am also looking at reference images on my second screen also make the most of front view and side view and I can't stress this enough but don't add Loop Cuts in until you're really positive you need them again that's fairly easy advice for me to give because I'm quite experienced with this sort of thing don't panic if you're a beginner do just go for it but you may find you end up with too many Loop Cuts then you might have to go back in and select some of the edges and dissolve them that's with the command control X can probably see as well that I don't do many extrusions I only extrude when there's an actual extra shape protruding from the body so the legs or the tail it's far more common for me to use the knife tool in fact I very rarely use the loop cut tool unless I absolutely have to because it adds so much topology all around the object 10 to more just going with the knife tool and cut the shape up as I see fit it gives me much more control you may occasionally want to move away from the reference images that's why I have lots of extra reference images just so I'm getting the shape correct now what you'll see me do now is cut a huge loop around the leg that's just for the sake of Animation it gives it more polygons to kind of stretch and distort when I move the arms and legs now as I said before this is all made possible with Nvidia studio and PC specialist as I'm sure you're aware blender's performance is greatly increased by the RTX cards so here I am in the viewport and I'm in Cycles using my CPU and you can see it's struggling to give me live feedback however if I change this to the RTX 1490 and turn on the denoise with the Optics you can see that I move around in my viewport and I get almost instant feedback which is fantastic for speeding up my workflow I can even get relatively good playback and this is in Cycles in the viewport the new G4 rtx40 series delivers up to a 70 performance jump over the previous generation and the great thing is blender uses the RTX GPU to accelerate Cycles Render and Ray Trace lighting thanks to the RT cores and uses the AI cores with Optics to denoise your scene really fast I wouldn't choose anything else except the RTX cards PC Specialists are in Nvidia Studio partner and leading system Builders selling a range of customizable PCS that perform amazingly with blender they specialize in custom PCS and laptops for creators and Gamers so configure your next Nvidia RTX system using PC specialist online configurator today [Music] the texturing is fairly straightforward I'm just adding material slots to the model or the rabbit in this case and in slot 1 I give it a sort of chocolaty color and I like to put the roughness all the way up to one then it gives it the look of fur in a way and for the other colors I add other different material slots such as white and black in fact the white in this case is kind of more a light brown and you can see me changing that here and you can see under the slots button that there's an assign option so you select some faces and you assign them to that material slot it's a fairly straightforward process there's other ways of doing it but I find this the easiest and I do tend to make the roughness to one for all those material slots the complicated bit after that is just deciding which areas you want the different colors I say it's complicated because it's not as straightforward as you might think you do have to adjust the position of the faces slightly if you want certain areas to be a different color to others and it's a good idea for a low poly look to keep this as simple as possible so don't have too many colors apart from that it's a fairly straightforward process [Music] The Next Step then is rigging and I use an add-on called the rigify add-on that has lots of extra armatures and you can see the animal armor is there if you go to edit preferences add-ons type in regify and make sure it's ticked you'll get access to those extra armatures the one that I found the most similar is the cat so I use that once it's in you'll see the mesh is hiding the Armature so you can go across to the object data properties and under viewport display you turn on in front and then you'll be able to see it easily then obviously it's a case of scaling it up and moving it into position now rigify is very clever and it can create really impressive rigs but I'm just using the bass rig at the moment so I'm just using the bones that are available there's an option to create rigger fire rig from this and you can get all the controllers and things like that but I'm keeping it nice and simple one of the reasons for that is if you delete lots of bones in the rig so I don't need the tail or the head face bones often because of those deleted Bones the generate rig option won't work because there if I add-on needs those extra bones to kind of work it out knowing which Bones to delete and which Bones to not delete can be quite awkward so basically I just use the bass rig and make it my own you'll see me testing it here and there by jumping to pose mode making sure the bits that I want to move are moving the most important bit I would say is knowing which bone is parented to which other bones that's fairly obvious if they're attached to each other but it's when you have those parented lines as you can see for each of the legs and the ears in this case so matching up the correct leg bone to the correct spine bone is fairly important I do create some ik so inverse kinematics as well that's really good for feet with Ford kinematics the kind of basic setup it's very difficult to place your feet on the ground but if you use inverse kinematics you can actually plant them much easier also you can probably see the coordinates and just above that there's an X mirror button whenever you're editing the mesh it's a good idea to have that enabled so it mirrors across the other side I don't have it enabled all the time while setting up the ik as that can get a bit confusing but I do symmetrize to the other side if you want to symmet your eyes you just right click symmeterize but you must make sure all your bones are named correctly for them to symmetrize from one side to the other and that's just having dot L for left after each name [Music] attaching the mesh to the rig is very straightforward go into object mode select my bunny rabbit then shift select my rig second and Ctrl P for parent and then select with automatic weights if I select the rig now go to pose mode and start testing it so G to grab and move around I can see whether things have worked or not and it all looks like it's working well [Music] now when you're moving your rig around you might notice that some areas of the mesh move that you don't want to move so this tail is moving some of the back as well so with the rig selected I shift select the rabbit and then go into weight paint mode that way I kind of have the rig selected as well and I can press Ctrl left click on a bone to show the weights of that bone so if I control left click on this one you can see all the weights there and if I go back to this one you can see some weight on the back of the rabbit so anything that is blue has no weight and then it goes all the way through the color spectrum to Red which is lots of weight now with the tools on the left hand side you can see I've got a smudge brush and a draw brush and I can use those to paint the weights I prefer using the smudge brush and I can slowly smudge the blue across and remove all the weights you can just paint on the blue as well if you want to you've also got the radius and the strength at the top and whenever I change to the draw brush you'll see you've got a weights option there as well so you can set it to weight zero and paint off any of the weights in areas you don't want it to affect I remember control left click is to select different bones and you can go along selecting different bones checking their weights and painting them in [Music] once you're happy with all your weights you can go to the animation workspace and start animating your rabbit animal person character whatever it might be animating can be fairly tricky I'm not the best animator I must say it takes a lot of practice and it's not really my specialism however to give you some tips think about key frames so my bunny rabbit has three key frames in its kind of walk slash jump cycle once those three are set then you can kind of decide on the timing so you can scale those keyframes in or out depending on how quick you want this movement to be then when you're relatively happy with those you can start animating those in between frames so you get the movement looking nice I think an important tip would be to press the record button down the bottom on your timeline that way when you move the playhead to a position on your timeline and you start moving your bones they will automatically set a keyframe and you can see here I kind of looped it to see what those keyframes are going to look like in a loop and I'm just simply copying those keyframes along to make sure it works I'm fairly happy with it at this point so I scale it all down and start thinking about the actual timing now it was a little bit awkward here because I had a keyframe of the resting position and I was trying to put that in that so it would be able to go between this particular action and another action but I slowly start to figure out the timings and then add some extra keyframes in between especially when it comes to trying to make sure the feet aren't going through the floor here's a quick shot in real time of the jump animation and once I'm happy with that then I continue making sure those in-between frames are looking okay as for the different actions that's a bit more complicated and probably something that I'll do in a different video but you can put lots of different actions onto a model and then when you export them to something like Unity or whatever it might be you can have those actions set up to different controls you can run around or have an idle animation like this bunny rabbit has so there we have it a low poly rabbit remember to grab your free download where you've got the blend file and the fbx so you can put it into your game engine if you have any questions or thoughts then comment below once again a big thank you to Nvidia and PC specialist for sponsoring this video and thanks to you for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 167,776

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, gamedev, lowpoly, low poly blender, rabbit, bunny, cute, 3d model, 3d modeling, animation, 3d animation, game models, make game models, low poly art, Blender 3, low poly, blender rigging tutorial

Id: iMar3keWaUo

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023