How to Rig and Animate in BLENDER!

all right let me guess you ready start creating some jaw-dropping animations like this however after downloading your 3D model importing it into blender and trying to animate it you notice that you can't actually move any of its joints but only its position rotation and scale well unless you're tet with your model just floating motionless throughout your scene like some sort of lifeless action figure in order to get actual joint movement out of your character you're going to need what's called a rig which is essentially a digital skeleton that can be used to puppet your model okay now how the heck do you create a digital skeleton well there's several different methods so sit tight boot up blender and let's begin foreign so the hardest yet most versatile method to creating a rig and blender is to Simply do it from scratch and blender itself this method is particularly useful when you have a model that has unorthodox proportions that require custom rigs as opposed to our generator rigs which we will cover later in this tutorial for this tutorial we will just create a basic human rig which assume you pass middle school biology class and know what a skeleton looks like should be pretty easy to make to create custom rig simply go to edit mode and add a bone then position and scale it so it sits in the middle of your model and covers the length of the body also make sure to go to the Armature settings and select in front so you can actually see the bones inside the mesh then subdivide this boat a few times by right clicking and selecting subdivide and boom now we have a spine after this you can select the edge of one of the spine bones and click e to extrude yourself a neck and E again to create a head bone we will use the security method for the rest of the extremities such as the arms and legs however since the arms and legs are the exact same on each side of the model it would be stupid to create a bone stricture for each arm and leg individually instead we can make blender do the other half of the work for us by going to the tool Tab and clicking X mirror axis now if we click on the central spine bone and extrude using shift e instead of e we can see that blender creates identical Bones on either half of the model meaning that we can just create arm and leg bones for one side of the model while blender automatically creates mirror Bones on the other side also when creating your skeleton you may end up creating some bones that are unnecessary if that's the case don't be afraid to go WWE on those bones and obliterate them using the delete button in most cases the important bones will stay connected to each other however if they become disconnected you can just reconnect them by selecting the two bones clicking Ctrl p and parenting them to each other while keeping the offset alright so once you got your skeleton finished the next step is to pair our mesh to our rig by doing this we are essentially telling blender that we want the rig to dictate the orientation position and scale of the vertices of our mesh anyway to do this you're going to need to First select your model then your rig then click Ctrl p and select automatic weights what are weights you may ask well without getting too technical weights are essentially blender's way of dictating whether or not a certain bone in our rig will affect a certain part of our men and how strongly it will affect it for example if you wanted the head bone to control the head of our mesh we would use weights to tell blender that we want the head bone to control our head and only the head as opposed to the other parts of the body weights are usually depicted using colors with red course money to the area that we want the bow to control and blue corresponding to the area that we don't want the bone to control luckily blender could actually do this process for us automatically if we click automatic weights when parenting so let's just click that and let blender do its thing Hold Up Wait A Minute something ain't right oh yeah I forgot to mention that blender's automatic weight feature only works like 50 of the time however there are a couple methods that can be used to get it to work for one after selecting our mesh we can go to edit mode mesh clean up and merge by distance doing this cleans a few things up in our mesh and in most cases allows blender to do its thing so let's try again and ah okay if it still doesn't work the next best thing we could do is simplify our mesh by deleting some vertices to do this go to the modifier Tab and let's add a decimate modifier to our mesh then by manipulating the slider here we can slowly begin to reduce the face count of our mesh you want to reduce the face count as much as you can before you start seeing actual deformations in your mesh once done you can click apply and cross your fingers as you try to parent again okay with that done we can now go to pose mode and check if the weights turned out okay by moving one of the bones Mission failed we'll go next time so yeah blunder's automatic weight feature isn't always perfect that's we're gonna have to clean it up a bit manually to do this select your mesh then go to the weight paint editor then we can go to the vertex panel and select the name of the bone that's giving us issues as we can see by the weight map it seems blender has left some of the areas around the bone blue when they should be red which is why they aren't following the bone properly to add weight to this area go to brush then select the add brush then paint the area that needs more weight and boom problem solved now all you need to do is continue that process until the whole mesh is properly weighted one eternity later cool now with our mesh properly weighted we should pretty much have a working rig however you may notice that's a little tricky to use like in order to get the hand in a certain location we have to move the shoulder bone then the forearm bone then the hand bone wouldn't it be nice just to move the hand bone and have the other bones move into the correct orientations automatically well that's where inverse kinematics comes in essentially actually inverse kinematics is just a fancy technical term that means we can change the location of the last bone in a chain such as the hands or feet and have the computer automatically determine the orientation of the other bones in the chain sound good alright to do this we first need to go to pose mode and select the bone that's the parent of the bone we want to control the ik chain with in the case of the arms that would be the forearm bone then we can add the ik constraint and select the Armature to be our Target now it's going to want us to select a bone in the Armature to control the ik rig with which would be the hand in this case however right now the hand bone is parented through the forearm and we actually want our control bone to be independent of the other bones in the arm chain since it will be the one controlling them one easy way to do this is go to edit mode and duplicate the hand bone then unparent the duplicate by clicking alt P after doing that we can go back to the constraint and select our duplicated hand bone additionally we can go down to the chain length and set it to 2 in order to tell blender that we only want our control bone to control the arm chain of the rig now if you go to pose mode and start playing around with the control bone you can actually see we have something that works however as of right now we can't actually control where the elbow bends luckily for us the ik constraint has an extra little function called pull Target which will allow us to use a bone to control where the ik constraint bends the arm bones thus similar to what we did with the control button we duplicate the hand mode on pair to and this time move it to the general location where the arm bends naturally which in this case would be behind our character after doing that you can go back to the constraint and select this bow as the pull Target oh yeah and if your arm bends in a weird way after doing that just mess with the pull angle until you get it back to normal now all you need to do is repeat this process for the other arm and leg chains and you'll have an intuitive and easy to use rig to animate your character with alright so although the previous method is incredibly time consuming you're usually guaranteed the best results from doing it since you yourself are doing most of the work to ensure everything is rigged properly however let's say you're running low on time you need something a little quicker or maybe you're just too lazy to rig your whole character from scratch well that's when rigified comes in you see although it might sound like a name for a construction themed Pokemon rigify is actually an add-on in blender that gives you a base skeleton to work with which with the click of a button can be turned into a professional character rig with inverse kinematics and all the bells and whistles you need for animation to access it simply go to preferences and enable the brigify add-on then if you click on the add button and go down to Armature you'll see that rigify has added some new options for us to choose from obviously if you have a humanoid model you're going to want to choose human meta rig additionally they also offer a quadruped rig for animals or any other four-legged Abomination your heart desires anyway once you click on that you can see that blender adds a human skeleton for us now all we need to do is hop into edit mode and line up the skeleton with our model in the case of our production crate model here all we really need to do is scale up the rig a bit and rotate the arms of the rig from a t-pose position to an a-post position so that they match the model then we can fiddle around with the fingers head and legs a bit so that they line up as well oh yeah and make sure to turn on X mirror axis for this so that you only have to edit one side of the rig and have blender do the other side for you also if some of the bones aren't necessary for your model such as the face bones then feel free to hop over to the Armature Tab and make the layer that has those bones invisible so that you don't have to deal with them alright now here's the cool part remember all that work we did to get the custom rig to work with inverse kinematics well with rigify all you need to do is boom bam pow yep and there it is your inverse kinematics rig is all set up and ready to go now all we need to do is parent to to our model and we are done [Music] okay now let's say you have like no time at all like when you missed your alarm by an hour so you had to brush your teeth and eat breakfast in the shower then drive to work like it was fast and the furious just to make it in time that's the kind of time crunch we're talking about here well what if I told you there's one method that's even quicker than rickify may I present miximo.com basically mix mole would do literally everything we covered before automatically and it even has tons of custom mocap animations you can apply to your model once it's rigged all you need to do is get yourself an active Adobe account and ID upload your model to the site tell Adobe where the major joints of your model are then let it do its thing you give that apply an animation to it or just download it as is import it into blender and boom I've rigged model in minutes seems too good to be true right well unfortunately if you look a little closer you may notice one issue yeah the rig doesn't have any inverse kinematics got your back because if you go to adobe.com and look in the plugin section you'll find that adobe has a Maxima plugin for blender once installed into blender as an add-on this plugin works pretty much the same as rigify where you can select your rig find the mix mode tab click create control rig then attempt not to cry as you look upon your perfectly rigged model and there you have it three methods to rig a model using blender no go use that rig to create the Cinematic animations you've always dreamed of or you just do stupid stuff like this [Music]

Channel: ProductionCrate

Views: 146,776

Keywords: productioncrate, footagecrate, rendercrate, soundscrate, graphics crate, vfx, vfx artist, visual effects, visual effects artist, free vfx, free music, royalty free, royalty free vfx, royalty free music, after effects, adobe after effects, adobe ae, 3D, 3D modeling, free 3d models, after effects script, free after effects script, film, filmmaking, independent filmmaking, character rigging, blender character rigging, 3d rigging, rigging 3d model, bender tutorial, how to rig blender

Id: 1khSuB6sER0

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023