How To Make 2D Character Rigs in Blender

hello and welcome to this tutorial on how to create and animate 2d character eggs within blender there are two halves of this video in the first half i'll be showcasing the various types of rigs that i've made and how you can use them and in the second half i'll be giving step-by-step instructions on how you can create your own 2d rigs so as you can see there's quite a variety of types of rigs that i've created such as very simple ik rigs like this one to more complex ik with lattice lattices to create this sort of bendy effect as we run through the timeline you can see they're animated because these are from actual projects that i'll provide links for and as you can see there's these handles that you can grab and move around for various parts this is the waist and the shoulders together or just the shoulders the head can be squashed [Music] the boobs have their own control as well and that's just an example of how the rigs can differ from each other and how you can create your own rigs you can be very creative in creating your rigs to make them do exactly what you want them to do and that's what i want you to come away from this video with here are some other rigs that actually completely transformed during the animation and as another example his head and his hands completely dislodged from his body in this one part of the episode here and i'll be showing you how you can create these rigs and animate them this character is only visible from the top half of his body in the late half of the episode which is why he looks so weird over there this is the president of south africa civil rumor poser as you can see he turns to the left at this part here which is just an example of how the rigs can be used it's quite versatile so without further ado here is how you create your own 2d character first off go file new 2d animation this will open up a new 2d canvas to begin drawing i'm just going to turn up the strength and turn off the pen pressure and press f to turn up the brush size zoom out a little bit and start drawing a basic head shape doesn't have to be perfect and i'm just going to start drawing the rest of the body slightly offset from the head so that we can separate it later just a basic torso shape and some arms i'm holding in shift to create straight lines basic hand not the best draw of hands but anyway and some basic legs okay that's good enough and i'm going to add some color to the fill layer so just create a new material here make it a light blue i think i'm making like a mr me six type character just gonna fill in the gaps there and just there we go there might be a better way to do this but i'm just doing it now for convenience sake and then let's just fill in the gaps okay if there's any issues you can just press tab to go into edit mode and just go into vertex mode and grab some of those press o to go into proportional selection alt o to turn off connected and then just drag your guys around so i'm putting a lot of shortcuts out there um what i what that basically is is the proportional editing and then you can press tab or mouse wheel to change the falloff basically and anyway that's our character so now we want to separate it into different objects so select the hand press p and go selected points and then just do that for every object go into stroke selection rather just so that you don't leave out any vertices and these are going to be our various body parts i think i missed one there i think i missed the edge portion yeah okay so now if we go into object mode we can select these as separate stroke objects now to create the armature go add armature just position that at his waist press tab to go into edit mode select the top drag it down press e to extrude bring that up press e again to extrude bring that up extrude again for the neck extrude again for the head this little bone in between grab it press x to delete and select bones i just want to create a gap there the reasons for that i'll explain later so now what we want to do is add inverse kinematics for the head and neck so i'm going to go into object mode because we need to add a empty to control it so i'm just going to turn on 3d cursor in the viewport overlays and then put the 3d cursor at the top add empty circle just make that circle smaller bring it down a little bit select the armature go into pose mode select the top bone go bone constraints inverse kinematics to i'm actually doing the wrong thing here on purpose to show you why okay so um oh i need to target that empty so where it says target just press that eyedropper and hover over the empty and there you go so now what we get is this inverse kinematics but it's not exactly what i want and to demonstrate why that is i'm going to select the head first i'm going to select the correct bone so make sure you have that bone selected select the head and then the armature press ctrl p and select bone that parents it to the bone you can actually grab the head and move it down now and then press press the neck put that in the right place grab the armature go into pose mode grab the neck go back into object mode grab the neck and the armature press ctrl p bone now when we move this empty around you'll see that the grease pencil objects are parented to the bones in the correct manner i don't like this though because the head rotates relative to its positioning which i don't want i want the head to rotate independently of where it is so to to remedy this i'm going to duplicate this empty make it smaller and put it at the top like this i'm going to go into my armature pose mode select this bone press shift hold and shift as i select the top bone press ctrl c copy selected constraints ik okay now select this bone turn this ik chain down to one select this bone turn that ik chain down to one press cross to remove that target press the eyedropper to add a new target that empty and as a final step grab this empty and parent it to the bigger one and now when we move this around you'll see that the head stays in position and if i rotate this head it the head i mean if i rotate the empty the head rotates so now if i press r and i rotate the head rotates if i press g it moves around so now i have two axes of control over the head i would just like to go over the relationships of the head here because i went through that part quite quickly and i used a tool that not everyone may be familiar with so the there are two ik chains here there is one for this bone it's connected to the large empty and it's got a chain length of one and there's another ik chain for the smaller circle and that's also got a chain of one and that's what creates this movement here and the way that i did that previously was i just copied the constraint and to do that go into your preferences go to add-ons type in here copy and just turn this on interface copy attributes menu turn that on so that that enables a variety of things you can copy constraints and modifiers across different objects so for example i can select this bone and then this bone press ctrl c and say copy selected constraints and then say ik which is what i did there just in case you are confused it's important to understand that all these elements can be edited even after you've added the relationships for example i can go into this armature go into edit mode and change the positioning of this bone and that will change the armature but then i can go and grab this neck i can go into edit mode i can resize that to fit i can grab the head and move that around if i want and that'll change the relationships but it's it's useful if you want to tweak your character egg or if you want to change it during an animation to create some sort of effect that is also possible the reason that i left a gap here was so that i can add more control so i'm going to place the 3d cursor there and i'm going to add another empty circle i'm just going to resize that i'm going to go into pose mode again select that armature with the ik on it i'm going to go copy location and i'm gonna target this empty so now if we go back into object mode we have more degrees of control because now i can actually move the entire head around as i wish and if i select these two empties i can move the head like this so that just gives me more control if i want to maybe make a side view of the character or maybe remove his head for whatever reason there's there's a variety of things that you can do but i find it useful to create this extra degree of control for every limb on the body so that it can be removed or moved to another part of the body so now i'm going to begin creating the arms so let's just go back into our armature edit mode extrude pressing the e key going to move that to the shoulder i'm gonna move that to the elbow it's gonna be a little bit shorter than what we've got there and i'm going to go back in here and delete that bone now i've made the arm one object and this is because i'm going to use a different system to the head and the neck i'm going to make the arm bend using a lattice so to do that i'm going to position the grease pencil over the arm i'm gonna add i mean the 3d cursor i'm going to add a lattice and then just turn that resolution up now i'm going to resize it do not resize this in edit mode because it will mess you up later let me just get that to the right size i'm pressing s and then shift x to resize that and then s and x and resize that along the x axis we can actually add more divisions let's make it about 15 and then add some vertex groups here okay and then the first group i'm gonna select that go into edit mode draw a box around that half of the arm and say assign to that group and you'll see it changes to red and then select the other half select group the second group and assign them to that now you want to rename these groups to the names of these bones so to check what the name of the bone is just go into pose mode you can rename this bone if you really want to but i'm just going to look at the number it's bone 6 and this is bone 5 so let's go in to the lattice again and rename this to bone dot zero zero six and this one to bone dot zero zero five so that's going to attach this vertex group to that bone and this vertex group to that bone so to create the effect select the grease pencil object just go into edit mode and move that into the correct place i can actually resize this lattice because i made a little bit too small just s shift x and then i'm going to go select the grease pencil go add modifier lattice and that's going to connect the lattice to the grease pencil with this target here i've got the ladder selected and now go into the lattice and add a armature and then select the armature and then what that should do is create a link between your armature and the grease pencil and there you go so now what we want is the ik so i'm just going to position the 3d cursor there add a empty go back into pose mode select this bone go bone constraints add a inverse kinematics target thus empty and set the chain length to 2 and if i've done that correctly we should have some basic ik and then of course as i was saying earlier i want to add another control over here so just add another circle there go back into your armature select that bone add copy location and select that empty so if i've done that correctly what we should have now is a arm that you can disconnect from the body and move around the body however you wish now we have some weird behavior here with the armature moving in 3d and we don't want that so i'll show you how to correct that now so up until now we've been ignoring the y-axis which is this axis here so to correct that we can just grab these and go into the object properties and set the y-value to zero and that will move it onto the x z plane and then we can actually lock those to the y axis just by pressing that button there and then now what that does is it just limits the rotation you'll see we get some strange deformation with the lattice so to change that select the lattice and go into your lattice properties and set the interpolation for the y value to catmor run i like to keep the v onto b spline but that might be different for you so maybe just experiment with those values to get what you want and uh what you see now is that there's this we haven't really got much control over whether the arm bends down or up so to fix that we need to add a pole so just duplicate this empty and select your armature go into pose mode select this bone go into your ik and select the pole target as this empty down here so now when we move this arm around we'll see that it's not in the right position so to change that go back in here and just rotate that until it's 180 degrees and then that should fix the problem yes so now when this is below the arm it bends upwards and then when this is above the arm it'll bend downwards fantastic so now what we need to do is connect the hand to the arm in order to do that i just uh changed the position of the origin there so to do that we can add a new bone onto our armature so just go into edit mode add a new bone on there we can actually um add two i like to keep them separated i've learned from experience that it's better to keep these bones separated okay um and then just parent this to your armature like that so now when we move the arm around the hand will stick to the arm but what we want is for the hand to be able to rotate independently of the arm now to do that a simple trick is to just select your grease pencil go add modifier oh no sorry rather go into your bone go into pose mode select the hand bone go into bone constraints and add copy rotation and then select the empty and just turn off x and instead of replace here under the mix just set that change that to add and what that does is it still maintains the rotation of the underlying bone but now when you change this the rotation of this empty the hand changes rotation so now you have independent control similar to how you have control over the head but we're using a different method instead of using two empties with ik chains we're using a copy rotation constraint so it's basically two methods of accomplishing pretty much the same thing hello so now is probably the hardest part of the entire process uh just copying this arm to the other side in theory this should be easy but it's it's kind of complicated so press numpad o to go back into your camera view select everything to do with the arm including this empty here if you press g and move it around it should move everything including the armature by the way and just press shift d and move that over to the other side press r zed 180 to rotate it grab this hand and just rotate it so that it's sitting in the right position then what you want to do is you want to rename the bones in here so that it doesn't get mixed up when you join the armatures together so select this one and just rename it to arm one can rename this one to arm two and this to hand okay and then if you select the lattice you should see that it's changed the names in here as well so now what you can do is just delete all the bones inside this armature except for the ones that are in the arm grab everything and just move it into position select the armature it will select the arm and then select the armature and then press ctrl j and that'll connect them that'll break some connections so if you select the lattice go into your modifier here and just connect that back up to the armature okay and the pole thing is not working either so if we go into pose mode select that bone go into constraints here make sure that this is on that empty okay it is and then just change this pole angle down to zero i think because we rotated it it sort of changed things there but now if we move this around you should see that everything is working as it should do and that hand is also working there you can see that the arm isn't exactly connecting up and you can actually just go in here and and uh you know edit it as you would um this is just a tutorial though so i'm kind of lazy to you know fix all the little errors but if you were uh you know creating a proper cartoon you would obviously put more effort into it okay on to the legs to create the legs we're going to go into object mode and select the armature go into edit mode and extrude out these bones to make the shape of the leg create two bones for the feet and delete the bone that connects to the ribs go into object mode add a lattice and position it over the leg add more subdivisions or resolution to this lattice and resize it so that it covers the leg okay and then we're going to add two groups let's go ahead and see what our name is this is bone 7 and this is bone 9 so we're gonna create two groups and call them bone seven and bone nine and then we're gonna add some these points to it okay let's just make sure that this connector is in the right place so it needs to be in between two points okay so assign those to the first group and assign these to the second group and then go into the modifier stack and add a armature to the lattice and go into the grease pencil and add a lattice okay let's see if that connection was working yeah that's working just fine let's just set this lattice to catamoram and we need to create inverse kinematics to add inverse kinematics just go into edit mode and make sure that this leg is bent in the correct direction and go into object mode duplicate these empties over the leg and create one for pole as well and select the armature go into pose mode go add constraints inverse kinematics and add the empty and for your pole add that object and select the angle to 90 change the angle to 90 select this top bone add copy location and copy the location of this empty now we should have a leg that works okay so now we need to parent this leg to this bone so we can do that quite simply by just selecting the bone in pose mode select the objects in object mode and go parent bone and now we want this bone to copy the rotation of this empty so so add a constraint to this bone uh make it a copy rotation and select that empty and now you'll see it it sort of messes up the rotation so we need to see which one of these to choose so go into object mode select this empty and just rotate this like this we'll see that it's the y that's changing the most so we can actually lock these two axes and we can do that the same thing for this hand and for this hand as well let's actually just reset this to zero and zero and rotate that so we're just sort of fixing the transforms now of the various things because there's a lot that can go wrong in this rig okay so we know now that it's the y-axis okay so go back into your armature and make sure that this is set to y but now you'll see that when we rotate this it rotates on the wrong axis okay so you need to change which um transform gets applied to which other transform if that makes sense so it's like a matrix operation but basically you want to change this xy euler to the right thing so we can actually just scroll through this list until we see one that that changes the rotation in the way that we want it to and this one has a different rotation so let's see if that works and you'll see that works just fine and let's just move this into the right position okay so just like this and like that so it's over the foot you take more care in your one bit we can see now that it moves appropriately okay so now let's just go and copy this leg over to the other side and delete all the other bones and let's just rotate this 180 degrees and see there's a bone that we left out over there okay move this into position we want to rename these bones so that it doesn't mess up when we join them up so just call this leg one leg two and foot okay then you wanna grab this armature and this armature and go ctrl j and let's fix this link on the lattice and hmm okay well that seems to be working still i just need to correct the 90 degree angle here change that to negative 90. okay so there we go we have our cartoon character we can actually increase the size of these circles down here so we have better rotating feet so now what we want to do is add control to the torso of the body in my previous rigs i had a bendy torso but i think for this tutorial i'm just going to keep it as a static torso so to create the torso add a empty actually just duplicate one of these empties for the waist and another one for the shoulders i'm actually going to delete this top bone because i don't want to create a bendy body it's just going to take too long so i might make another tutorial on that but let's just parent this okay so what you want to do is you want to copy the location of the first empty um let me just select that one and let's actually make this a little bit smaller okay move that down a bit right and we select this bone and add a inverse kinematics and select this top empty and set the chain length to one not that it matters because this is the base bone and we want to parent the right things so at the moment the bone moves but the body doesn't so let's parent this okay so now the torso moves so select these three empties and select the armature and parent them to the bone so now the top half of the body moves around with that empty and parent these two empties to the empty so don't parent these to the armature parent these to the actual empty because this empty is controlling the armature anyway right so now when we move this around we'll see that we've got a dancing blue guy dancing mr mesex maybe [Music] so the point of this is basically minimal effort for animators so we can turn off the lattice we can turn off the armature and we don't need to worry about those things as animators we just worry about the controls as you can see the legs aren't exactly in the right place but we can fix that because we can just pull them up and pull up the feet like that and there you go as you animate you'll find that there will be uh little things like these fish that you get maybe that thing that all of these things can be fixed and i have fixed in in my rigs basically what you have to do is you have to break up the coloring of these sections well of this arm intersections that'll remove the the this effect over here and to remove these fish you can simply create a mask actually let's do that now so what you want to do is select that grease pencil object go into draw mode go into your layers add a new layer call it mask and select lines add a mask and select the mask layer as you'll see it'll hide everything so press that button to invert the mask and now what you want to do is draw a little section where it will hide the lines when the arm bends so go into your mask layer and select a fill stroke and just draw it over the arm section like this oh okay i first have to turn off the letters so yeah let's just turn that off and we can draw in here like that okay and go in here and set the opacity of the mask to zero so we can't see it but it's already masking out that line as you can see so if you go into edit mode you can see this um grease pencil object it's not perfect make it perfect in your version okay so let's turn this lattice back on and when we bend the arm now you can see that you no longer get that fish effect and you have now rather the small defined forearm and that works on my production rigs the last thing i want to show you how to do is animate the grease pencil objects themselves so say you want to change this first this hand into a fist what you do is you have your grease pencil timeline down here so change it to another frame go into draw mode and simply start drawing so go into your lines and we can you know draw a fist i don't really know how if this looks but i guess it's something like that okay uh select your dots full and just do a fill line and it'll automatically draw over there so now when you go over your timeline he changes his hand to a fist and you can add as many f in between frames and there as you want to animate that transition and the same goes for the head you'll find that you'll want to repeat a lot of frames and for that you can use the frame offset time offset i think it is yeah time offset and you go fixed frame so now i can uh add multiple things in here let's let's add a frame for oh whoops let's add a frame and for a big smile like that okay so go back into object mode and go into your frame and change it to fixed frame and now if we use this we can change it and you can animate this value so you can have as many different mouth movements as you want i think i made it so this hand changes over time the head no longer changes over time but if you wanted to you can animate this value so let's make it two and then on the next frame make it one and as you can see we've got a little animation going on there so thank you very much for watching guys if you enjoyed this video take a look at my other content i'm going to be making a lot more videos soon thank you so much for watching love you lots bye goodbye

Channel: Pleyland

Views: 60,193

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Id: sCHjoI_cEx4

Length: 40min 52sec (2452 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020