How to Make 2D Character Rigs in Blender 2 - Bendy Bones

okay so uh there you go is some really bad animation hello and welcome to part two in this tutorial series on how to create a 2d character rig in blender if you would like to follow along with this tutorial download the free project files from my new patreon page link is in the description so to begin with i would like to talk about some things that i neglected to mention in the previous video for example bendy bones so if we select this arm and move it around you'll see that it's still quite stiff and what if we want to make these bendy so let's select the armature and go into pose mode and select all of the bones that are using lattices to move or bend the grease pencil object that will be all the arm bones and all the leg bones then go into bone properties and go into the bendy bones panel and turn this up to four and you'll see the leg changes but only that one bone changes we want all these bones to change at the same time so let's turn this back down to one and press and hold alt on your keyboard the alt key and then while you have that held down turn this up to four and you'll see that all of the selected bones change at the same time so now if i go back into object mode and i select this hand control and move it around you'll see that the bones are now bendy so now that we have our bendy boned guy we can turn off the armature and the lattice and just test him out and you'll see he's quite happy and if we move this pole back and forth we'll see that this leg is not actually working as it's intended this is a mistake on my part from the previous tutorial and how to correct that is we can turn the lattice back on and select one or both of them and go into your lattice properties over here and with else held down just change these both to kathmaram and you'll see they change there so just make sure both these lattices are set to catamaran in the interpolation and the lattice properties here and now you'll see when i flip this back and forth we no longer have that problem so now our guy is looking quite dapper and uh i can move him around his torso is still quite stiff though and i will correct that in a moment but what i think is more important is being able to move the sky around with one go without moving each point individually currently now if we select the armature and move it around you'll see that it doesn't really work we can select all of these control bones and move them you know all together so let me just select all of them and move them around but you'll see that that is quite tedious okay we can add these to a group we can say control g create new collection call this control okay and now press shift g and go collection control and now that just selects that automatically and that's fine but it doesn't really solve our problem because now if i go into the armature edit mode you'll see that it flicks from where we have the character to where we created the character and that's not really great either so let's uh just move this guy back by undoing all those steps and see what we can do about this now let's add a empty in the middle just a cube and resize the cube until it's over the guy we can make it smaller in the y axis i'm just pressing uh s and y at the moment you should really know your g s and r keys if you're going to be using blender very very useful right now i'm pressing s and z just to scale it in the z axis and now set on y you just want it centered over his body like that okay so now i'm going to press shift g and then collection and actually sorry shift just select one of these control points go shift g collection and select control to select that all the control points and we're just going to select that cube that we just created and press ctrl p to parent okay so now if i move this mother object around all of those points move around but what about the armature what about everything else okay so let's just turn lattices on if you want everything to move with this character not just the control points select the armature and parent that to the mother object and now as we move that around we'll see that we get some funky things going on there with the arms and the legs so select the lattices and the objects that they are linked to and select the mother cube and press ctrl p and parent those too and now as we move that around you'll see the character moves and if we go into edit mode that edit mode is over the character just as we intended so all of this is in a collection if it's not you could just move them all into one collection there and if you want to now duplicate this we can right click on this collection and say duplicate collection and now you'll see that i have two little guys that can be animated independently from one another before we get into the process of creating a more dynamic torso for this character someone asked how would you actually animate this and the answer is quite simple because everything that is in this program is editable or animatable should i say so let's turn off the lattice and the armature and let's just grab one of these control points okay and let's uh press on auto keying here and i'm going to hit spacebar to play and then i'm going to hit g okay so spacebar okay that's more than enough okay and let's go to zero and press play and as you can see we've got a animation and i'm not doing anything and now he's got a fist so let's make him do something with that so pump his first while he's grooving away okay and there you go and this guy can be i'm gonna do a rotate so let's press spacebar and then r and wave wave wave wave wave wave that's good enough and we can actually add some movement in there as well so let's press spacebar on g uh and we're getting some funky behavior okay let's undo that because that did not work as intended but uh there we've got some yeah the the rotation's a bit weird so we can cancel that but the point is that you can just animate things by hand like that okay that is going to annoy me so let's go into the dope sheet here and we can see [Music] i'm just going to turn on selected here select that point and just select all keyframes and delete them and that movement is now gone okay so if we wanted to actually animate that hand like i want to let's uh rather so auto keying is off i'm going to put it into position there press i and add a keyframe and then go a little bit ahead put it in a different position put it there and from there put it back up here and and so now we've got uh some weird hand movement that doesn't really fit the rest of it but i'm just showing you how you would animate it so uh let's grab this rotation as you can see here it says euler rotation x y and z and i'm just going to move those a little bit so now the rotation is going to lag behind the uh movement so let's see what that looks like uh yeah you get the idea okay so let's make this guy walk in from the left hand side so i'm gonna go to frame 100 and i'm going to set a keyframe there pressing i i'm going to go to frame one press g and x to move this guy off the screen i'm gonna set another keyframe and now you'll see he walks on the guy and he's like hey what the hell is going on man all right so let's uh put these guys this guy's hands down just so he's got a better pose there you can see the arm is in the wrong place so i'm going to press g and y and just move that forward a bit there you go all right so now i'm going to grab the foot and i'm going to press spacebar and g and let's see if we can get some walking okay that's good all right so let's do the other foot oh i forgot to i forgot to put recording on so let's try that again okay can actually just move all these keyframes over a bit all right let's do the other foot okay i was a bit janky but yeah let's actually do that again so i just deleted the keyframes there let's try again now try again okay uh animating literally by hand right so let's uh get some bounce going on that walk okay and maybe a head movement as well i can go back and forth okay so uh there you go is some really bad animation usually i wouldn't animate like this i'm just actually doing this as a fun experiment i would usually painstakingly add keyframes and stuff but this is quite fun i'm quite enjoying this so how would we make his face turn towards him all right there's lots of ways to do this i've seen people create their own head rigs and stuff it's quite amazing but i'm just gonna do it a really simple way okay so i'm gonna go into edit mode um okay so we have a frame selector time time offset thing on here so i'm just gonna copy this frame to let's say a hundred okay and then i'm going to create a another frame here just by moving so when we move these pieces while we're on a different uh we're on a different let me just change the okay so while we're on a different frame and we have those strokes collected and we move them it's going to create a new frame there right so there we've got his face kind of uh looking i'm gonna just move the mouse a bit all right so now we've got him moving his head that in that direction so we need to interpolate between those frames so i'm going to while my mouse is over the viewport i'm going to press ctrl shift e okay and what that does is it just interpolates between those two frames [Music] all right we can also you can also do that so i'm going to just undo that you can also just do that by going interpolate sequence it's linear at the moment so let's change it to sinusoidal sinusoidal i don't know how to say that and then change it to an ease in and ease out and go interpolate sequence so and there you'll see it's a bit of a smoother motion all right so when i go into object mode you'll see that that animation is no longer there and i'll show you how to fix that but first i just want to fix this little problem of his head poking through i'm just going to so i'm just going to grab that grease pencil head object and i'm going to press g and y and just bring it forward a bit so now as we play that you'll see it no longer intersects with the neck object okay so to get this animation playing we're going to go into the time offset modifier and we're going to first go back a few frames actually let's go to the beginning of where we want this to start so we wanted to start about there so let's just add a keyframe there go one frame ahead set this to 100 okay and we want it to go to 120 frames ahead so just go in here and press plus 20 all right set this to 120 and we have some movement there i think i forgot to actually add a keyframe before so i'm just going to go minus 20 and set this to 100 and keyframe so now if you play that you'll have a head movement there and that's just that's quite a long way to create a head turn but i mean it works there are other ways of creating headrigs i haven't quite figured it out yet you have to use actions and things hopefully in a future tutorial i can create that and now a word from our sponsors hey surprise it's me again i'm the sponsor are you sick and tired of waiting months for videos that the creator promised would be released days ago do you need 3d furniture but have no 3d modelling skills well you can solve both of these problems at the same time by going to turbosquid and buying my furniture or going to the patreon and donating i have tons of 3d furniture and i'm making more every day if you want me to upload more buy it and i will or by sending me an email and commissioning a work of art such as a caricature or an animation or a video game or an app or whatever it is i can do it maybe just try me i also do consulting if you have any issues or anything like that need some help with a blender project or something send me an email maybe i can help i also work for a company called blank canvas collective have a look at the youtube page we do 3d renders so as i mentioned in the previous video there's quite a large variety of different methods to creating rigs for example this rig has many different moving parts this leg for example has a foot included and it's whereas in the um rig that we're building the foot is separate from the leg um in both of these uh rigs the body is bendy and there's uh some extra bits and pieces that the rig that we're currently building doesn't have so in the rest of this tutorial i'm going to show you how you can add some of these things to your model so to make this torso bendy we need to look and see that this torso is just one bone so we're not going to get any bendiness out of that we need at least two bones and uh we need we need a base bone for this to bend against okay so in edit mode select this ball and just uh move it up a bit and press e and extrude this down now i'm just gonna flip this over so move that down and select that bottom ball press g and move it up okay and then select that top bone to parent it to this one and press ctrl p and say connected all right so now we have these bones and they're connected together so let's just move that to about there okay so we need a lattice because currently this grease pencil object is parented directly to this bone and that's what gives it the static movement okay so to unparent it just press ctrl p and say clear and and keep transform okay so that's going to keep it in the same place so now if we move it around we'll see it's no longer parented all right so put your curse over there and add a lettuce and just resize this lettuce so that it so that it's the same size as the torso okay so i'm just using s to resize it and then go into your lattice properties over here and turn the resolution and the w up to an appropriate number about nine will do okay i'm just gonna make that a little bit fatter all right we can change these to cut more rom before i forget okay and let's just add a armature modifier to this and select the armature okay and i know that this bone here is called a bone and then this bone here is called actually let's rename these so let's name this but and let's name this uh chest okay so then we go back into the lattice and we select the vertices that are over there in fact let's turn this up a little bit more so let's turn that up to 12 okay so let's select those vertices and add those to a new group called chest over here and assign those and then select the bottom vertices and assign those to a new group called but okay and now we need one more thing we need to connect the grease pencil to the lattice so i've already added this modifier because i've gone through the step already so let's just do that again so add a lattice and select that ladders great and so now if we move that around we see we get some bendiness there but these these bones aren't bendy yet so let's just uh make them so select them both and turn that up to four or five four will do okay and now we get some bendiness in the torso and that's fantastic but if we move this we'll see it's not connected so we need to reconnect that in fact let's connect these um to that because currently if we look here in the object properties we'll see that's parented to the butt control which is this big circle but we want them to be parented to the bone instead so let's just make sure we have this bone selected okay and then let's go into object mode select these two circles say control p and keep transform then select the armature press ctrl p and say bone and nothing should really have changed now except now we get no movement out of that because this bone isn't connected to this yet so let's select the armature go into pose mode select that bone go into constraints say copy location and copy copy the location of the bat control okay so now if we go into object mode we should see that that's functioning all right um we actually need to clean up some stuff here so this has got copy location because it used to be the base bone so just delete that that ik can stay okay so great we have some movement now now we need to get this rotating because if we press r and rotate it's not rotating so to get that rotation we're going to go into the armature select the base bone say copy rotation and select the ctrl but all right it goes all weird don't worry we only want the y rotation in there so that'll fix that also we want to just limit this rotation so it doesn't go off off the wall so make it so that only the y axis can rotate okay so let's go back in here and um because i don't think this is going to be rotating correctly so if we rotate this we'll see it rotates on the wrong axis okay so don't worry about that we need to fix that by going into your copy rotation and changing this order and i know by experience that it's it's uh z-y-x-y but you might need to oh okay maybe not or i think it is maybe i just rotated it too much so let's go into object mode and yeah there we go so that rotation is currently working it's it's jumping back and forth here probably because of the poles so we need to add a pole for the torso so just duplicate this empty select the top of the ik chain and make this pole target that okay so now if we yeah so now it's no longer jumping back and forth right so the final thing that i want to show you is how to um make squash and stretch so currently if we move this down it doesn't really do anything so we can't really have this character bending over forwards or doing any fancy squashy movements so to fix that let's go into pose mode select this bone and add a stretch to and just select this control torso and now you'll see we have a very squashy man but his head and his arm are now squashing and we don't want that so the reason that it's doing that is because these bones are parented to that bone and they don't have to be because the way that we've got it set up is these bones are following these objects so let's uh select these actually in edit mode not pose mode select these two bones press ctrl p and say clear parent okay and now in object mode if we you'll see that it's squashing nicely and the head and the arm are no longer moving all right so um i also just want to fix this thing because this needs to be much higher than it is oh this is no longer parented to the right thing i think that was a consequence of parenting that to the mother so let's just do that move that up and that should be working just fine okay yeah perfect okay so um i think that's pretty much all i have to say so thank you guys so much for watching if you've made it this far uh congratulations i hope you've been follow along following along with me and it's all been doable this is just one method of animating and there are way more ways of doing it and sometimes a rig isn't the best way to go this is the best way to go if you've got a long animation with the same character doing quite simple movements um if you want to do like a fight scene or something short it's probably best to use frame by frame animation and a lot can be accomplished there i recently did a music video that'll be coming soon just depending on when the artist wants to drop it and as you can see i did frame by frame animation using blenders interpolation tools and it worked quite well i i watched the movie soul recently and there was a quote from there saying that uh you know the music is just uh an excuse for you to show yourself it's uh it's not the be all and end-all just in the same way that this animation technique is just a guide for you to uh exhibit your own creativity and your own spirit um you know everything from the drawing to the way the character moves is all up to you i can only give you the tools to to do it so um and that's what gives it value as well as is your own style so please feel free to impart your own creativity and style into this project yeah for final notes i guess all of these objects are editable um and if you've got a problem like this happening here all you do is you just grab this object that you want to be in front and you move it on the y axis okay and if you've got your auto key framing on there and you just pay attention to the keyframes you can make it so that the character is always um in the correct order in terms of the like you see here this leg is clipping through the body so just move that backwards a little bit okay and uh yeah and when the arm flips because of the pole you'll see that the hand goes over so you just need to find that point in the animation where the arm flips and then just make sure that the hand changes its layer at that point and that may sound time consuming but this is animation and that's what it's all about spending time to create art all artists is uh you know spending time unless i guess you're a genius um yeah so oh as we can see that isn't working actually let me fix that before we end the tutorial so we need to parent the grease pencil and the lattice to the mother so just do it like that and there you go all done all right hopefully i haven't made any mistakes or left anything out in this tutorial um thank you again for watching if you like my content please have a look at my patreon and the rest of my youtube channel and consider subscribing thank you so much i love you lots and bye

Channel: Pleyland

Views: 7,254

Keywords:

Id: q1zisQ5KqAA

Length: 30min 18sec (1818 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 03 2021