How To Easily Rig A Character With Auto-Rig Pro (Blender 3.2 Tutorial)

i'm going to show you how to rig a humanoid character very easily using auto rig pro then i'm going to show you how to rig a stop-motion mouth using my new add-on fz swapper okay so i created this character here and a lot of times the characters like to create for this stop-motion style i've been so into lately are just in separate parts like look this hand is just cut off the head same deal the eyes they're their own object here and in doing so i have basically just a list of different objects and when you're creating a character you might also have a bunch of separate objects that consist of your entire character i always find it very handy to make one collection just called mesh or character mesh or something of that sort where you have all of your mesh objects inside of that so if i were to then grab my character mesh i can just right click and then select all these objects that's going to be a very helpful thing going into using auto rig pro so i'll turn off mouth for now and then i'll just turn on character mesh if you have hair on your character so for example my character has a little beard a little bit of scruff right here and it's obviously controlled by a vertex group just make sure it's locked so that way auto rig pro won't overwrite it because if it's not auto rig pro will automatically overwrite any vertex groups that already exist on your character mesh and the other thing is just make sure your eyes make sure the eyes are named so we can just grab our character mesh right click and select objects so now only the objects inside of our character mesh are selected then on the rig tab of auto rig pro just go right down to the smart section and get the selected objects full body okay and i will just go through and start dropping these parts in so the neck should be right around where the base the neck is the chin and you can also zoom in here um and really dial in where this is i like to put the chin almost to the bottom before the chin goes the shoulders should be right about you know not the top of the character but right where you think the pivot point should be for where the characters shoulder should start to swing wrists i put these right around the base of the wrists just as it asks spine root this is the only one that might be a little confusing try to put this right around or under the belly button section ankles put our ankles right here and now all the pins are in place it's just going to ask us a series of questions here so number of fingers my character has five by default but maybe you're making like an alien or just a stylized character has four or maybe even three fingers you can change that number right there and it should auto detect those the only other thing you might want to change is this twist count by default it's at one but i like to put mine up to three this what this does is it helps with the twisting of of the character's forearms and legs so that way whenever you have to do an intense twist it's more of a gradual thing going down the arm rather than being very intense to the point where you can actually see oh there's where the bone is adding a few to the twist count helps to sort of soften everything up and then we're going to go into this facial setup here so um we are here in the facial setup now it just jumps right into the face and we have all these control points that tell us where things are i'm not going to use the mouth but generally speaking this you will line up on the outside of the lips for the character so wherever the characters lips are going to be just try to like trace the the outside of that border these eyebrows up here you can just click one of these control points and hit l and it will select the linked and then you know by default we're mirrored so you can always turn that off if your character's face is a little asymmetrical and then you'll want to make sure you select the eyeball object this is going to be what is the object that your eyes are and mine is just eyes and i will put my eyes over where each character's eye should be and my eyes are actually not mirrored it's on purpose it's sort of a character asymmetrical thing sometimes i just kind of scale them down on the z-axis a little bit like that these two are for the ears so i try to put these about where the ears would go again my character doesn't have ears in this case and i'm going to turn off all of the most these face controls because my character's not just not going to use them all right so once it's all lined up i can just hit go and then once that's done you'll see that your character should have all the bones in place here now um it put all these put all these face rigging bones in here and this is just a lot of bones i'm not going to use most of these so the one thing i'm going to do is before i before i do anything i'll just grab my character's head here which is where the face comes from and then i can access the limb options for the head and you'll see all of these bones that i really just don't need any of these and then hit okay and then it will get rid of all the ones i just don't need and once that's good i'm gonna look through the rest of my character here and i'll see okay all the fingers line up perfect everything seems to be lining up the way i was hoping it would very nice i will match this to the rig and then you'll see it generated us a rig that we can use for our character now our rig works but it's not it's not attached to anything it's just kind of there we have to we have to add those bindings in so we'll just do it object by object here to make sure it works the way we want to so i'll grab this hoodie as a start so you always want to grab the mesh first then shift select the rig and just click bind and all the default settings should be perfectly fine for this and then it shouldn't take too long unless your character has a ton of vertices and then you can just go into pose mode here and start moving things around obviously there's some clipping around the wrists but that's because the hands aren't connected yet we'll do the hand mesh then rig then bind and there we go and i'll just go through and do that for the rest of the parts of this character for the head specifically there's the this one this one checkbox refined head weights i suggest i suggest you check that one because what that does is it tends to help just weighting the chin a little better all right so our character seems to be fully attached and everything is moving properly which is just what we were hoping for another another nice thing you should do is if you if you already have the name for your character you can go into the misc tab here and then set your character's name my character is named crud uh so i'll just go ahead and keep that then it sets the um the name of this collection here so crud but it also names your character's rig now this is not necessary but it's a lot of fun here the mouth for our character i just have this character this mouth here that i made for this character this is like a neutral pose but i also went and i created an open shape and sort of a an ooh shape right now you can create all these shapes as necessary but how my add-on works is you'll go to the tab here and you'll select an object so i have this mouth object which right now is just a plane and you don't need anything else you just need a single plane for this to work and you'll see it's selected up there you'll go into the swap builder and the controller should be the mouth turn these all on so i'll select my neutral and i'll add a swap shape and it added that one in as the neutral i'll just name this neutral i'll select the uh shape i'll add that as a shape the ooh shape and i'll add that one as a shape and then i can build the swapper and now the mouth object created a geometry node system down here we can hide the builder and now we have our controller here so we'll just put our full mouth right into crud right into our character so now we can just select the mouth and we can go through and you can just start swapping these shapes out as needed and it auto keyframes too the last thing you want to do is grab the mouth and then grab the rig and then go into pose mode on the rig select the head and just ctrl p parent that to the bone specifically so now the whole mouth moves with the head rig and it still works with everything i hope you learned a little something about just how easy it is to rig a character using auto rig pro i mean it's seriously like my favorite add-on i use it for every character i create if you're interested in my add-on for doing swappable mouth sets and swappable like hand triggers or like blinks or whatever you can imagine it's great for like claymation style stuff right links in the description for that also check out this secret little video here since you made it to the end it'll explain it in a little more detail of what we got going on so hope you enjoyed this video catch you next time 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Channel: FruitZeus

Views: 38,819

Keywords: How To Rig A Character In Blender, Auto Rig Pro Tutorial, Blender Auto-Rig Pro, Blender Auto Rig Pro, Auto Rig Pro, Auto-Rig Pro, Blender Rigging Tutorial, How To Rig A Character, Rig A Character Tutorial, Character Rig, Blender Auto Rig Addon, FZSwapper Addon, Blender Addon

Id: tynVLq5XPdA

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022