Let's Learn Blender!: Character Rigging 101 (Armatures, Bones, & IK)

[Music] hello my name is colin and this episode of let's learn blender is going to be all about bones armatures and rigging in this video we're going to be using blender to add a skeleton in other words an armature into our 3d scene that controls this little character in blender unless your character is like a robot or a lego person where every single part of the character at every joint is modeled entirely separately in which case you could simply create a parent child link or hierarchy so you can animate the character and pose each part of it separately it turns out that when you have a character model that is largely one mesh or maybe a few different pieces put together it turns out that you need to use an armature in order to make a character posable and bendable at the elbows and knees and things like that and so in this video i'm gonna be showing you exactly how to create an armature from scratch from one single bone into a fairly complex ik or inverse kinematics rig that is easy to pose and animate by the way in this video i'm going to be using a model called the cartoon knight by lucas de miguel now if you were to go ahead and get this model for yourself you would notice that it comes pre-made with a rig now this rig is awesome this rig has custom bone shapes it has fancy on off ik fk toggles right there in your 3d scene we're not going to be going quite this far with our rig rig is going to be a basic ik or inverse kinematics rig that'll be pretty respectable and you'll be able to animate with it so if you want to go ahead and follow along with me for this video you can go ahead and get this file that has just the character model itself in the file you can go ahead and find a link to download it in the description area below this video here on youtube of course so i'm going to start off here by just changing my 3d viewport from rendered viewport shading over to material preview mode and then i'll just give my scene some more even lighting and it'll make working in the viewport a little bit easier and i'm going to point out to you that this character is modeled quite wisely in the very middle of my scene you can see that the blue z-axis line in my scene runs right through the middle of my character and you can see if i look at my scene from the right side with the number pad 3 on my keyboard the character is pretty well in the middle of the scene left and right as well or front and back in this case and my character is fairly symmetrical that means that they are posed in this is called a relaxed t-pose the character's arms are sticking not quite straight out and the fingers aren't perfectly straight out either it's kind of a relaxed but still neutral position it's going to be easy for us to create an armature that is symmetrical without too much left and right differentiation now to add an armature into blender you're going to want to go up to the add menu and select armature but before you do that if your character is lined up left to right evenly and they're in the middle of their world well it makes sense that you want to add your armature into the middle of your world as well in fact i'm going to suggest that you add your armature into the middle the very middle of your world precisely and that means you're going to put your 3d cursor where all new objects get created to the middle of your world precisely so i'm going to go ahead and i actually don't need to use this precursor tool at all but what i'm going to do is press shift s on my keyboard shift s will bring up the snapping menu which will allow me to put my 3d cursor to the world origin precisely which is 0 0 0 in my xyz coordinates so once my 3d cursor is there i can go up to the add menu and add an armature when you add an armature it is a single bone inside of an armature object and of course you can customize the armature to be multiple bones but all within the armature's edit mode so this armature has one bone if i go up to my mode menu you can see that unlike a mesh object an armature has only three different modes object mode which is what we're in right now it also has edit mode where you can customize add more bones set the bones up create parent child links between different bones and then finally pose mode which is what you use when you're essentially done creating the armature and you want to pose or animate your character that's where you do that work right now i'm going to go into edit mode where i can select individual bones in this case my only existing bone but you should know that bones at least in this view have a few parts there is the main part of the bone there is the head of the bone that's the joint at the beginning of the bone where you might have another bone attached to this bone as well as the tail of a bone now right now this bone if i switch between my different views you can tell that it's running through the middle of my character and that's good but what i can do is go down to the object data tab right here which when you're in edit mode of an armature looks like a little person and just so we can see the entire bone i'm gonna go under viewport display under the object that i tab right there and i'm going to turn on in front now in old versions of blender this used to be called x-ray mode and i think that was a good name for it as well essentially this lets us see bones through a character mesh even if the bones are inside or behind the mesh object so now you can see i can see the bones no matter what i'm going to take this bone and select it by clicking on the middle of the bone and i'm going to move it up inside of edit mode because this bone is going to be my little character's pelvis bone so i'll just move it up so the bottom of the bone if i go to my side view i can see it more clearly is roughly at the location of where a pelvis bone would be so i'll move it down a little bit like that and i can make this bone smaller by grabbing the bone's tail and using my move tool of course i can move the tail down to make the bone smaller and if i zoom in you can kind of see where it is i might take the entire bone itself and move it back a little bit and if you look at human anatomy you will notice that pelvic bones tend to tilt forward so i'm going to grab the tail of the bone and move a little bit forward a little bit more accurately so if i go back to my front view it still looks like it's up and down it's still in the middle that's great to make more bones to make a spine and a rib cage and a neck and a head bone because every part of your character needs a bone we can simply select the tail joint on a bone and tap e on our keyboard to extrude out a new bone from the tail of an existing bone so for my side view maybe i'm going to select that tail little orb and i'll tap e on my keyboard and move my mouse up and i get another bone that's attached to the original bone so when i'm happy with where the new bone is i can simply click to make that bone placed where it is and of course i can select either the head or tail of the bone and move and adjust i'll tap g on my keyboard where exactly the bone starts and ends at any time in edit mode i'm going to keep going i'm going to select the tail of my little spine bone here and i'm going to tap e and extrude up i'm going to call this bone the rib cage because anatomically humans have a larger ribcage section of their spine which really doesn't bend very much so i'll make it a little bit bigger there as you can see and so my spine is going to be actually quite small on this character that's fine i'm going to keep going i'm going to select the tail joint here and i'm going to tap e to extrude out a neck and i'll make the neck go to right about there and finally e a head bone and i'll put the headphones straight up and down so after i tap el tap z on my keyboard and then move it up to the top and click it's as easy as that now a few important things to point out to you here is that we are right now inside of edit mode of one armature object this armature happens to have multiple bones but if i go back into this object's object mode you can see that this armature is basically one thing one object in my 3d scene in order to edit the individual bones they are not their own armatures they are just individual bones inside of one armature object so i can go back into edit mode to edit them individually the other thing to point out about these bones is that they are connected they are children one after the other with an overall parent of the very first bone that i started with in this armature so the pelvis bone which right now is called just bone has a child bone and i can go ahead and select that child bone and look at what its parent is in other words its relationship with another bone in the armature by going down to the bone tab this is a secondary tab it's also i believe an object data tab but secondary because we have multiple things in the same object under the relations section heading here in that bone tab we can see that its parent is just the bone named bone if i select the bone that's next the rib cage bone which is called bone dot zero zero two will rename these bones in a few minutes you can see that this bone's parent is bone zero zero one so if i were to go into pose mode which is where we can actually animate impose our character if i grab this pelvis bone and tap g and move it you can see that it's moving all of its children however if i go ahead and grab a middle bone the rib cage bone and i tap g well it's not gonna let me move it because it's attached to the bone that is its parent the spine bone however when i tap g it actually does the best that it can it rotates and its children the neck and the head bone they stick to it they move along with it now typically you wouldn't pose your character at all any of the bones before you're finished rigging your character at all so what i'm going to do here in pose mode is press a on my keyboard a of course selects all in blender and when you're in pose mode a selects all of the bones that you can see in your armature and i'm going to go up to this pose menu and say clear transform all what that'll do is if i post the character it'll just reset it to its default pose which usually is pretty much how you create the bones when you're in edit mode and creating the bones in the first place okay so i'm going to press tab now to get into edit mode or i can use my mode menu up here of course and i'm going to keep going from my front view i'm going to select the little joint that's at the base of the neck and i'm going to extrude out so i'll tap e a shoulder bone and that shoulder bone will go to the base of the arm and i'll click so there we go and from the top view i can see is it roughly in the right spot from the side view probably not i'm going to actually move the tail of that shoulder out to the middle of the arm and maybe i'll take the rib cage and the neck and move them back as well and maybe i'll move back this bone as well and move it down as well and you can see we can adjust things as we go now this shoulder bone needs to end where the arm is going to rotate where his shoulder socket bone would be in real life so maybe i'll move it to right about there and i'm going to select that tail and tap e and i'm going to extrude out the entire arm all the way until the wrist because i want to show you that you can select an entire bone itself and you can right click on it and say subdivide and when you subdivide a bone it cuts it into two bones in fact if you were to subdivide a bone you could go down to the subdivide little pop over down here right after you did right click subdivide and you could make one bone into many bones if you like i'm gonna leave it at just one subdivision so two bones there you go and from the top view i'm gonna make sure it looks good in fact i'm gonna go into wireframe view and just take a look at where my elbow is so i'm gonna take the little joint orb right there and tap g and put it right about there i'm going to intentionally put a little bit of a bend in the arm and that'll help us pose it more accurately later on from my front view i'm going to extrude a simple set of hand and finger bones because my character is essentially wearing mittens i can get away with not having individual finger bones so i might move the tail of that bone there i'll tap e extrude out a hand bone to right about there and then i'll tap e again and just create one finger bone like that how does it look from the top view well it's a little bit too far to the back so i might move these two bones forward something like that now if i want to have a set of bones to be able to control the thumb separately well i could just select this joint here of course and i could tap e on my keyboard i'm going to make a simplified version of this so maybe a bone from there to there roughly from the front view i'll need to move that down and then from the top view i'll maybe extrude out a bone to there and i'll have to move that down and i'm going to go pretty quickly for the sake of this video to right about there and be there and then i'm going to take that single thumb bone and because i do want some articulation i will right click and say subdivide and then i'll take the joint in the middle of those two new bones and i will move it a little bit to make it have a little bit of bend from the get-go so here we have a set of bones for our arm our hand our our fingers what i'm going to point out to you though is that if i go into pose mode just temporarily and i try to pose my hand this hand bone has only one direct child the fingers and you might think the thumb would be and all of its pieces would be children of the hand as well and they should be but because i extrude out the thumb from the end or the tail of the lower arm bone the thumb therefore is a child of the lower arm and not the hand so if i were to oppose the hand the thumb doesn't move along with it when it should so i'm going to right click to put it back in the right spot and of course i could press a to select all and pose clear transform all to reset all the bones to their default pose so i'm going to go back into edit mode i'll use the menu this time and i'm going to select the top thumb bone and then i'll hold shift and select the hand bone and press control p to make the thumb a child of the hand instead of the lower arm and in this case i'm going to say keep offset because when you make a bone a child of another bone well if a bone is a direct connected child of another bone that means that it would start at the parent bones tail down here we don't want the thumb to start down there we want to start wherever it should be right up here so we're going to say not connected what was that option called i'll do it again select the thumb and the hand control p keep offset was the option that i chose not connected okay let's go ahead and create some legs and feet bones so down on my character's lower half i'm going to add a new bone to start the upper part of the leg so right now if i actually go up to the add menu and add a new single bone i don't need to extrude out from the pelvis bone to make a leg because we don't need a shoulder for the pelvis i can just create a new bone starting from right here so because my 3d cursor still in edit mode is down here if i go up to the add menu because i'm in edit mode of an armature right now i don't have all the other options to add things like mesh objects and cameras and lights the only thing i can add is single bomb so that's the only option it gives me so add a single bone it adds one rate where that 3d cursor is i'm going to go ahead and grab it and i'll move it up to where the start or top of that leg should start somewhere right around there from the side view i'm going to go ahead and move it back to right there and i can grab the tail of the bone i'll tap g and move it all the way down to where basically the ankle would be and i can go ahead and zoom in to make this leg have two pieces of course i can select it and then i'll right click and say subdivide that'll chop the one bone into two but it of course makes a child and parent link when it makes those two separate bones i'm gonna give the leg a little bit of a bend right there so it's not perfectly straight and i'm gonna put the ankle where the person's ankle would essentially be so i'm not going to put it all the way down at the bottom more like up here that'll bend more naturally when we go to pose and animate the character i'll tap e on my keyboard to extrude a new foot bone to right about there and then i'll tap e and then y to extrude and then constrain to front and back or forward and backward the toe bone so there we go how does it look from the front view it looks okay i might want to grab the lower leg and feet and toe bones and just move them a little bit over to keep things centered like that you will notice that i'm only modeling or creating an armature for half of my character and that is intentional because we can have blender do the opposite half automatically for us assuming that we name all of our bones correctly in a way that blender recognizes the difference between the left shoulder and the right shoulder before we start naming these bones i will point out that inside of this armature my leg is not at all attached to the pelvis and we need it to be so i'm going to select my leg bone hold shift select my pelvis bone we need to make the upper leg a child but not connected but still a child of the pelvis bone so when we move the pelvis it moves the upper leg as well so with these two bones selected in that order ctrl p keep offset is what we want to do and now this bone has a parent under relations on the bone tab the parent is the bone which is the pelvis speaking of which we need to name our bones and so what i can do is select each bone in edit mode and press f2 on our keyboard now on my keyboard i have an extra function toggle button otherwise my function keys act like media control buttons so i turn on little fn key and then f2 acts like a normal f2 key on a computer keyboard once i've done that f2 let's me rename a bone with a little pop over up here i'm gonna name this bone pelvis and press enter if you can't use your function keys and you want to name bones just in blender's interface you can go over to the bone tab and then up to the top you can name the bone right there okay it's not the object that one is called armature it's the whole armature's name but under the bone tap you can name each bone i'm gonna go ahead and very quickly name the center row of bones with these names over on the right side of your screen right now so i'm gonna go ahead and speed this part of the video up i'm gonna go ahead and press f2 on my keyboard and here we go so we have all the bones named in the middle of the character they are named head neck ribs spine and pelvis when we're naming bones that are on the left or the right side of the character in this case these bones that we've created for our arm and the leg are on the character's left side we're gonna name them with a special format that i suggest that you use because blender will recognize it and will help you out in very nice ways and that is when you name one of these bones i'll select the shoulder and i'll press f2 on my keyboard i'm going to name this shoulder but here's the thing that you should do is you should add a dot and then the capital l for left so shoulder dot l i'll press enter that l is capital of course i'm going to name this bone you might think i might name it upper arm dot l but i tend to like to put the name of the limb first so i'm going to switch these around a little bit i'm going to name this arm upper dot l and that way when i'm searching for things or looking for things i'm not finding things called upper arm and upper leg next to one another in other words all the arm pieces will be listed together i tend to prefer that so i'll name it like that so arm upper.l i'm going to go ahead and speed this part of the video up i'm going to name all of these bone pieces with the names up on the screen right now so let's go ahead and do this very quickly okay so let's go ahead and name the legs and feet and toes with the following names that are on the screen right now i'll speed this part of the video up and there we go we've got all of our bones named at least for the bones on the character's left hand side now if we are ready to we could have blender automatically take all of the bones on the character's left side and duplicate them and flip them so we would have a complete left and right character rig complete with all the naming automatically done for us because blender can recognize when you put dot capital l on a bone and when it creates a flipped copy of those bones it will automatically name all of those dot l copies to dot r which is super super nice and handy but there's one problem with this rig and that is if i go into this armature object's pose mode and i try to pose just the armature as it is yeah we haven't added the controls so that our armature is actually controlling the mesh of the character right now and we'll get to that a little bit later in this video but right now if i try to pose this character let's say i want to have their hand be up here next to their head i'll actually turn on material preview mode right there if i try to grab this hand and i tap g on my keyboard and try to move it up to right there next to the character's head like they're going to wave well i can't do that and that's because what we have right now is called a forward kinematic in other words an fk rig now what that means is that because each bone is a child or a parent of the bone before or the bone after that bone well it means that if we grab the hand we can't move the hand's parent the lower arm or its grandparent the upper arm just by moving the hand when you move a child in a parent-child hierarchy that goes up a chain like we have right now well a child can't move its parents so in other words if we want to move the arm and the hand so that the character is going to wave with their hand up next to their head i would need to select their upper most parent bone in that chain first i might tap r to rotate that bone to pose that bone where it's going to be and then down the chain the next child down i would need to rotate that one and then maybe i'll take this bone or rotate it maybe i'll double tap r to make it face forward and then we've got that arm and the hand in the right pose but this process of having to actually pose and rotate each individual bone is a little bit of an arduous process and would take far too long to animate anything in a realistic pipeline and timeline so there is a better way and it is called ik or inverse kinematics what we're going to be setting up right now will allow us to grab just the hand and move the hand up and we can control how many bones up the succession of parents and grandparents the hand will be able to control which will allow us to pose our character much much easier the same process we'll do to the feet and legs so if we want to make the character step up we don't have to rotate each bone in the leg to pose the entire leg we can just grab the foot okay let's go ahead and back to my front view i'm going to go ahead and press a on my keyboard to select all of my bones i want to clear this pose out so it goes back to the default pose so a to select all the bones pose clear transform all by the way this all under clear transform in pose it doesn't have a keyboard shortcut and so what you can do instead is right click on this all option in the menu and say add to quick favorites what that'll allow you to do is simply once you've done that you can go and press the letter q on your keyboard and anything that you've already added quick favorites will be listed here now the fact that this says all isn't very helpful but as long as you remember that that's what that's for you can use it and so i'll click on all after pressing q on my keyboard to bring that menu up and it clears all of the location rotation scale of all the bones that i have selected which is really nice so i have half of my armature and it is a forward kinematics rig to make an ik rig i need to make a couple of targets in my rig in my arm one for the hand it's going to be a separate bone that's going to act like a target to control all of the upper bones in other words the arm lower and arm upper bones along that chain as well as a target for the elbow and then we'll do targets ik targets for the foot and the knee if you don't know what i mean by targets don't worry you'll understand in just a moment in fact up here at the hand of my character a target an ik target is going to be a duplicate bone that is not part of the same child parent hierarchy but still a bone that's in your armature so we're not going to create a separate armature at all for this we're going to create a duplicate hand right now so i'm going to go back into edit mode select my hand bone and then i'll press shift d on my keyboard shift e will of course duplicate to create a copy of that selected bone and i'm going to right click right away to put that copy bone right in the exact same spot as its original now this target we do not want to be a part of the same chain of parent children so with that duplicate bone selected i'm going to go over to the bone tab down here and i'm going to turn off or remove its parent because right now we made a duplicate of the original hand bone and because the original hand bone had a parent so does the duplicate so i'm going to go ahead and remove i'll click this little x right here the parent of this new hand ik target and still with that bone selected i'm going to do a couple of things i'm going to rename it over here hand ik dot l and i'll press enter yes i could have used f2 there but we were already there in that tab so i just use that little input box right there and to make this bone differentiated visually from the original hand bone i'm going to press n on my keyboard or that little tiny arrow right there to bring up my properties panel at the side of my 3d viewport and under the item tab at the top you can see this bone's properties again we are still in edit mode of the armature so i can change this bone's length right in place and if i turn on x-ray view in my viewport right here you can see now i can see bones that are inside of bones which is what this one is and i'm going to make this ik hand dot l bone a little bit longer than my hand just to make it different and easy to see and more importantly easy to select one from the other okay i might want to actually hold shift on my keyboard and then click and drag with shift held down to make it more accurate and a more precise just slightly larger like that now the reason why we need this secondary bone is because when you're setting up an ik system for the arm of your character the ik target needs to be a separate bone that's not constrained to its parent because it doesn't even have one in the first place and we're gonna be adding a bone constraint to the forearm or lower arm bone that will be told to point always and stick to the ik target bone that's how it works so we have this hand ik bone it has no parent it's a little bit bigger than the actual hand bone now i need to go into pose mode of my armature so i'll go up to the mode menu and go into pose mode and i'm going to tell the lower arm or forearm bone to always stick to that hand ik bone with a chain length that means up the arm all the way up to the elbow and that means two bones are going to be affected and always kind of stick to wherever we move the hand ik target bone to do this i'm going to select that forearm bone and go over to the second to bottom tab in my properties editor when you have a bone selected in post mode and that is the bone constraints tab down here well make sure that your forearm bone is selected not any other bone you want to add a constraint to the lower arm bone so with it selected i'm going to go and add a bone constraint called inverse kinematics that is ik for short when you add this constraint to the forearm bone it's going to give you a little dotted line from the tail of that bone the wrist essentially all the way down to the root of your entire chain and what it's going to be looking for is what bone should be this whole chain's target and that's going to be our hand ik bone so with this forearm bone selected under the options of that constraint we need to choose the target right here and so i'm going to click in that box and just choose the armature for now and then once we've selected the armature i'm going to choose the specific bone to be the target so i'm going to click in bone i'll type hand ik and then you can see it's right there i can search for hand and then click on the right one so there we go if i were to now select that hand ik bone and tap g you would see that i can move that target bone and it's making all of the bones up this chain kind of follow it now too much is happening here when i move the hand ik target i don't want the entire skeleton to move i only want there to be a chain length of two bones that are affected by the movement of this target bone so i'm going to select all the bones i'll press a on my keyboard in pose mode i'll press q on my keyboard to clear all or of course pose clear transform all my bones go back to their default orientation and pose what i can do now is select that forearm bone and change the chain length here from zero which goes all the way it's infinite essentially all the way up to the very root of the entire chain of bones up to one and two and you should be able to see at this point when you do that a little dotted yellow line that goes all the way up to the top of the arm just below the shoulder okay so now if i grab that hand ik target bone g you can see that i can pose my arm and the elbow is right there and the elbow is bending as as needed and it's quite easy to pose not so easy though because this hand the actual original hand bone that will be controlling the mesh hand of my character is still pointing whichever way is default based on the rotation of its parent what we're going to do is make the hand the actual hand follow or copy the rotation of our ik hand so we'll only need to animate the ik hand to pose the entire arm and to rotate the actual hand so let's go ahead and do that i'll press a on my keyboard to select all the bones i'll press q for my quick favorites and all i'm going to select my original hand the smaller one the one that actually controls the mesh of my character or the one that will and i'm going to add under the bone constraints tab a foam constraint called copy rotation when i do that it turns i believe green and we need to tell it what to copy the rotation of in this case i need to give this copy rotation which is on hand dot l not hand ik dot l a target so i'm going to select the armature and then i'm going to give it the hand ik dot l target and so now it should always copy in real time the rotation of our target and ik bone so now if i grab that hand ik target the bigger one and i tap g you can see that it works a lot better and if i pose the hand up there i can then tap r and rotate just the hand eye k bone and it'll move the actual hand bone as well which is quite nice you will notice that you will be able to grab the hand ik bone and move it past where the actual hand bone can go that is just a limitation of this system we could put constraints on this hand eye cable that stops us from moving it way out of our scene just be careful though as an animator you should get used to this pretty quickly and get used to how to move it and not get it too far beyond where the actual arm can go you generally don't want your arms to hyper extend unless you really intend to have them do that okay i'm going to go ahead and press a to select all the bones q to clear all the rotation location and scale of my entire rig by the way when you have these ik target bones generally and this is quite important for a few steps a little bit later on we want to select all of our ik targets as we make them and go to the bone tab for the ik target bone and turn off deform what this option does to form is if you have it turned on and we go a little bit later in this video and we want to attach all of the mesh pieces of the character to all of the bones and have the character actually posable we don't want the ik bones to actually pull any vertices in the mesh we just want these ik bones to act like controllers for other bones and not the mesh of the character so we turn on the ik targets we turn deform to off okay but you will notice that with our hand when we move our hand up or anywhere it's very now difficult to control where the elbow is pointing in our character if i want to make my character let's say do something like well what i'm doing right now basically my character could do the chicken dance if i rotated this bone we're actually rotating one of the arm bones instead of actually having to manipulate an arm bone one or the other what we want to do instead is add a pull target to the other end of our ik constrained bone what this means is i'm going to go ahead and press a and then q and clear all the transformation in my pose i'm going to go back into edit mode and i'm going to add basically a target bone where my elbow should be pointed at and therefore if i have a target bone for my elbow me later as the animator will need to animate that elbow target in order to make my character's elbow point up or down or wherever it needs to point so with my elbow joint selected right there in edit mode i'm going to tap e on my keyboard to make a new bone coming right from the elbow i'm going to tap y on my keyboard and make this new bone extrude backward so from the side view right there i've gone straight back on the y-axis e and then y i'll make the bone about that size now ik target bones do not have parents so i'm going to select that bone i'm going to go down to under the bone tab and under relations i'm going to turn off parent or remove its parent and therefore when i select that bone i can move it straight back and then with it out there i'm going to make this bone the head of that bone that joint at the beginning where the elbow is always point in that direction so to do that with that bone selected the forearm bone i'm going to go back into pose mode and i can see now if i select that bone the constraint options for my ik constraint and here i'm going to select the pull target as that elbow ik bone so i'm going to select the armature as the pull target and then it'll give me the bone option and here i'm going to actually have to name that bone so i'm going to select that bone and under the bone tab i'm going to call it elbow ik dot l and yes i can name bones in pose mode that's okay to do so under the constraints of my forearm bone i'm going to point to elbow ik dot l and that's going to be the pull target when i do that you might get lucky and it might just work right away if i grab my hand bone and i move it you know in towards the body is that elbow pointed towards the elbow ik target no it's not and i'm actually glad about that because it might need a little bit of different tweaking depending on your specific model so i'll go ahead and adjust this as needed for mine what i need to do here is select that bone that i have my constraint on the forearm bone and change the pole angle because we want that bone its head to point at the ik elbow target so this pull angle i'm going to try moving it it's not going to be a positive direction so i'm going to try a negative direction and from my side view i can just kind of eyeball it i'm kind of drawing a line out there and that looks pretty good to me this is a fairly odd number often it'll be a negative 90 or a positive 90 or a negative or positive 120 degrees in this case is negative 120 gonna be a good number yeah that's that's pretty good so now if i grab this bone in pose mode and i move it up and down you can see my little character can do the chicken dance okay great let's go ahead and set up ik for our leg and this time i'm going to show you a shortcut to make this process easier i'll go ahead and press a and q and clear all transforms for all my bones in pose mode i'm going to go ahead and select the foot because i need to make an ik target for the foot i'll press tab to go into edit mode of my armature i'm going to duplicate the foot shift d on my keyboard i'm going to right click to put it back in the exact same spot i'm going to press f2 right away i'm going to name it foot ik dot l and press enter foot ik.l is going to be the ik target if i go under the bone tab i don't want this bone the ik target to have a parent so under relations on the bone tab i'll get rid of its parent i'm going to make this bone the ik target a little bit longer than the original foot bone just so we can see a difference between them so i'm going to change the length here i'll hold shift and drag to the right shift will make the this this change more accurate and slow and easy for me to control so right about there and i'm going to make a target for the knee just like i have a target for the elbow up at the top there so i'm going to select the knee joint and from my side view i'm going to extrude out a new bone e and then y and then i'll move that out and make a small little bone there it needs to be called i'll press f2 on my keyboard knee ik dot capital l just like that and then under the bone tab i'm going to get rid of its parent under the relation section right there and i can move now this target bone out to where the knee past where the knee would ever bend okay so if a knee can touch this you haven't gone and moved it out far enough okay what you should also do and this is a good habit when you're making these ik bones you should also always turn off the form so with the knee selected to form is now off i'll select the foot bone the foot ik bone rather and i'll make sure the form is turned off for that as well don't forget that did we do that for the elbow no we didn't so i'll turn that off right now with the lower leg selected i need to make it point at the foot ik target to do that i need to set up my constraint which needs to be done in pose mode so i'll go back from edit mode into pose mode now here's the shortcut for you if you don't want to have to specify the target manually when you go and select your lower leg bone and go to the bone constraints tab in pose mode and add the constraint manually you don't have to add it manually in this menu at all the shortcut here is if you select your ik target first and then you hold shift and this is in pose mode and you hold shift and you select the bone that you actually want to add the constrain to last so the target first hold shift select the bone you actually want to add the constraint to second and you press shift i shift i on your keyboard is a keyboard shortcut that's meant for adding ik exactly as we are doing right now so shift i add ik to active bone i'll click right there and you can see when i do that it adds the ik constraint to the last bone that i selected so i said this one and then this one second this one last therefore this bone has the constraint and it automatically now has the first bone that i selected as the target which makes half of our work essentially done i need to change my chain length to 1 2 to make it go up to just the base of the leg i need to choose my pull target which is going to be knee ik dot l so right here pull target armature knee ik dot l you can see that the pull target angle is not right it looks like it actually might be 180 degrees wrong so i'm going to try 180 like that and now you can see that when i bend the leg up or move the foot up that actually was not right when we move the knee back and forth it looks like it's almost doing the right thing but i need to adjust i'll press q all to move that back into position this bone i need to adjust the pull angle so that it's pointing and if i go to my top view maybe i can see or my bottom view i can see where it's pointing to better just like that i'm trying to draw a line straight out to there how does that work let's go ahead and press a and then q and clear all transformations if i grab my foot ik target bone and i move it straight up does the knee point at the right spot if i move this back and forth how does it look if i move the foot okay target back and forth it looks pretty good if i press a and then q and clear all transformations you'll notice that the foot now is not in the right spot compared to the foot ik bomb and that's okay because we need to make the foot match the rotation of the foot ik bone just like we did for the hand we made the hand copy the rotation of the hand ik target bone so i'm going to select the foot bone i'm going to add a bone constraint under that bone constraints tab it's going to be copy rotation i'm going to select a target and then the bone is going to be called foot ik dot l and there we have it now i can just grab the foot ik bone and i can grab it and pose my character one thing that might help you out before you start adding ik constraints if you want to have fewer issues with the angles of your pull targets you can go into edit mode of your armature and with all of your ik bones already there so i already have my elbow and knee targets i already have my hand ik and foot ik target bones before you start adding constraints though what you should probably do is select all of your bones inside of edit mode and fix the rolls of all of the individual bones all at once now bones as you can see can get twisted if i press ctrl r on my keyboard i can change the roll how twisted a bone is in other words it's local kind of rotation now when you start adding these constraints you want to make sure that all of your bones are consistent in your armature and when you are just extruding out bones they are probably not so the solution to this is if you go to your front view in blender and you press a to select all of your bones in edit mode what you can do is you can reset all of your bones roll at once from the perspective of your current view which for me is front orthographic i pressed one on my numpad to get there or i could press the negative y i believe as well right up in there in that gizmo so with all my bone selector now in edit mode i can go up to armature bone roll recalculate role and then i can say view axis and that will reset all the bones to be consistent based on the view that i'm looking at them from right now and the front's a pretty good view to have so view axis like that if i go back into pose mode now you can see my arm is looking pretty good if i grab this elbow ik target bone and move it up and down is my elbow pointing at it in a nice way from my side view if i move my elbow up and down not quite so it will change the way that your elbows point but it'll be a little bit nicer hopefully in terms of its values so i'm going to change this pull angle back to zero just so you can see what the default is and if i move this bone my elbow ik target up and down you can see that i think these bones are rotating 90 degrees off yeah so if i select this bone let's try negative 90. and you can see hopefully therefore that this joint the bend of the arm is back to a nice you know pointing a little bit backwards and not down or up or to the front or something like that and so now if i grab the elbow target that looks much better okay it looks like its back is always pointing up or down depending on where i put that elbow ik target bone okay the foot and knee however are not great i'm going to change the pole target angle of this bone back to zero and you can see that with this constraint and the pull target chosen that the leg is pointing in some very strange direction so i'm going to change the pole angle to try to match and if i reset if i press a on my keyboard and then q and all i can put my bones back in their default pose and now if i select my lower leg where my constraint is if i change my pull angle back to zero how are we doing here well from the side view it looks like my leg is pointing backwards based on the the angle of these bones and that dotted yellow line there so if i go to my front view yeah it's not doing so well so i'm going to try rotating this in fact 180 degrees and from the side is now pointing more to the front and so now if i move this bone left and right is that right let's go ahead and try moving the foot ik bone up g and then z on my keyboard no it's not right at all it should point towards the knee target so i'm gonna grab this bone and then change the pull angle so it matches and if i go to my front view i'll be able to see that 120 is a common value although in this case i think i'm gonna use something like 128 or so okay so there is my setup how does it work if i grab the foot ik target bone and move it up you can see that i can now make my characters knees go out or in like that there is one more bone to make in this setup before we copy all the bones on our left character side over to the right and so i'm going to press a on my keyboard and then q and clear all the transformations in pose mode aq and then select all and that last bone that we're going to create in edit mode i'll go back to edit mode it's going to be a controller bone because you might want to just move your whole character around in your scene without having to grab your character's pelvis maybe you want to grab all of the ik targets and all of the character all at once just slide them around the set to put your character in the right spot it will be very beneficial to you to have a bone that's right on the floor right at the base of your character so in edit mode i'm just going to press shift s on my keyboard to make sure my 3d cursor is back at the origin of where the armature is at 0 0 0 in my world so shift s and then cursor to world origin so i'm gonna press shift a on my keyboard in edit mode shift a will add a new bone right away starting right at zero zero zero and i'm just gonna go ahead and move the tip of that bone down straight down on the z-axis pointing it down a little bit just like that or so it doesn't matter how long this bone is that's a good spot and this bone is going to be the parent of not only the entire actual character bones so it's going to be a parent of the pelvis which was the original parent of everything else so i'm going to select the pelvis hold shift in edit mode and i'm going to select this controller bone and i'm going to press ctrl p make parent but keep offset so i'll click on keep offset i'm also going to now make all of these ik target bones the elbow the knee the foot ik and the hand ik right now they don't have any parents and so if i were to go into pose mode and move this controller bone around i'll grab my move tool and that bone in pose mode and i'll move it forward you'll notice that the ik bones are left behind and i don't want that so i'm going to press q and clear out that transformation put that bomb back where it should be at the origin of my scene and back in edit mode i'm going to select all four of my ik target bones the elbow the knee i'll zoom in here the foot the whole foot and the hand the ik hand pardon me and then i will select that controller bone last with shift of course and control p and then keep offset like that so now all of those four ik bones are children directly of the controller and that means in pose mode i can grab just that controller and move the entire character rig as it is and that will move the entire character okay back into edit mode we need to make a second half of our character and so i'm going to select all of the bones i'll press a in edit mode blender has an automatic flip and duplicate and rename built in and that is simply when you have all the bones selected in your entire rig you can right click and you can say symmetrize it's just that easy if i click on symmetrize it will make a duplicate of all the bones that end in dot l it'll flip them on the x-axis and it'll rename them all with dot r so it's really that easy i have my entire rig now if i go into pose mode i can grab either hand ik target and pose i'll double tap r to rotate that hand up i can put this hand down i'll tap r on my keyboard to rotate that hand down i'll rotate my view and make my character look like they are stepping up onto something so i'll grab the foot ik target move it up there and maybe move the knee a little bit over like that so i have my character rig post now because my character happens to be a little cartoon knight character with the shoulder pads and with a little visor object that we want to rotate probably opening and closing throughout our animation i'm actually going to make animating this character a little bit easier with those objects by adding bones for them as well bones and armature don't just need to be for a character's limbs they can be for other things as well we might even add a bone for the sword so i'm going to go ahead and select a bone in my armature in pose mode i can press a of course and q to clear it out to its default pose i'll press tab to go back into edit mode of the armature and i'm going to add a bone for each of the shoulder pads so i'm going to press shift a on my keyboard to add a new bone i will grab it and put it up to the base of a shoulder pad with the top and then i'll grab the tail and i'll move it down to right about there from the top view how does that look i need to move it back a little bit in fact i'm going to move it over to the character's left side because i'm going to use that symmetrize tool again but on more bones that we add these two bones for the shoulder pads so wait like that i'm going to select that bone i need to give it a name so i'll press f2 on my keyboard i'm going to call it shoulder pad dot l capital l there at the end and with that bone selected if i right click on it i can say symmetrize and hopefully it'll make a copy and name at shoulder pad dot r isn't that nice these bones do not have parents yet and i'm going to parent each one to its respective upper arm bone that's probably the one that's going to move most closely with so i'll select this bone in edit mode hold shift select the upper arm bone control p make parent keep offset i'll click on keep offset same thing here click hold shift select control p keep offset just like that now because my character has this visor i'm going to add a bone for that to select part of my mesh because i'm going to make the base of a bone for this visor stick straight out exactly starting in between the joints so it rotates at the right point from the actual mesh of my character what i want to do though is actually select part of the mesh and figure out where the bone should start and put my 3d cursor there right now because i'm in edit mode of a armature i can't select the mesh because it's not in edit mode of the armature so what i'm going to do is go back to object mode and i'm going to select my character's head and that head object if i press tab to go into edit mode has these pieces at the side and if i go into edge select mode and i hold alt on my keyboard i can select the edge loop which it is right now if i click on something else you can see that all of those became deselected so if i hold alt and click on edge it selects an edge loop i'm going to orbit around to the other side of my character and hold shift to select more i'll hold shift and alt though because i'm going to select this other edge loop on the other side so i will hold shift and alt and click just like that so i have these two edge loops selected and i'm going to put my 3d cursor in the middle of those two loops so i'll press shift s on my keyboard and i'm going to say cursor to selected i'm doing this so my 3d cursor goes to right in the exact right spot so that if i go back i'll press tab into edit mode of my armature i'll select my armature and press tab to go into edit mode if i add a bone right now shift a on my keyboard will add a bone very quickly it will rotate at the exact right spot for that visor when that visor needs to rotate okay with the tail of this new bone selected i'm going to press shift s and this time i'm going to say selection to cursor i'm going to put this little tail right at that 3d cursor as well so selection to cursor after shift s and now the bone is in a really scary point our bone basically has a length of zero we don't want that with the tail of the bone that is still selected selected i'm gonna move that tail forward exactly okay don't leave your bone with the tail and the head at the exact same spot that's bad news okay so now we have the visor bone wonderful just before we get to attaching the entire character mesh to the skeleton i need to make sure this visor bone has a parent it should be attached to the head so i'll select it hold shift select the head bone control p keep offset with make pair okay and because the helmet in my case of my knight is one big piece i actually don't need the head bone or the visor bone to be deformative to deform any part of my mesh and so this is going to save us a few steps a little bit later on it might make our armature rig a little bit cleaner and the way it controls the mesh i'm going to go back into pose mode and i'm going to make these two bones one at a time and go under the bone tab and turn off deform what this means is that with the form turned off when we go to make the entire body of the character attached to the bones these bones won't influence the wrong parts so turn off the form on bones no aren't part of where the character will do any bending at all okay this piece is not going to bend at all so i should turn that bones deform off same thing with the head bone the head won't deform or bend at all so i will turn the form off okay now to actually attach the character's mesh what we can actually see in our animation to the individual bones we're going to use a special form of parenting for the main part of my character which will need to bend depending on which bones are bent in which way when i bend the elbow i want the mesh of my character's arm to bend appropriately we're going to select that main part of the character and hold shift because we want to make it a child of the armature but to each individual bone as appropriate to the armature essentially if i press tab on my keyboard what we're going to be doing here is making it so that each vertex of my character is going to be assigned a weight that means an appropriate amount of control by its nearby bone now for some vertices in my mesh like the vertex in the middle of my character's chest it's likely that that vertex will be entirely weighted or controlled by the rib cage bone and that's fine but some vertices in my mesh like around the loop that's right at the elbow joint well those vertices will be controlled a little bit by the upper arm a little bit by the lower arm and so blender has to figure that out for us it doesn't always do a perfect job but we can give it a shot to do this i'm going to press tab on my keyboard to go back into object mode and i need to select that mesh the main part of my character hold shift and then select my armature so i'll hold shift select the armature i happen to be in pose mode right now and that's fine if you're not able to impose mode by the way select your mesh and back and forth because we usually have to be in object mode to select different objects you will need to go up to the edit menu and turn off lock object modes with this option turned on if you are in pose mode you cannot select a mesh object okay you are stuck to selecting only bones in that armature so i can turn that off by going down to edit and lock object modes and turn off you also might find that if you have the x-ray mode turned on in your viewport like i do right now you may not also be able to select any mesh when you're in pose mode i figured that out not too long ago so x-ray needs to be off and this option needs to be off lock object modes and then you should be able to select mesh objects when you're in post mode okay so the mesh object gets selected first you hold shift select any bone when in pose mode doesn't matter which bone you're going to press ctrl p because you want to make the last object you selected the parent of the first object that you selected control p however you're not going to select object in this case you're going to select armature to form but with automatic weights okay that's going to automatically assign each vertex to the right bone hopefully i'll click with automatic weights when i do that or when i just did that it assigned every vertex to a bone to a certain amount if i grab a bone in pose mode now just that bone actually i'll grab the hand ik target down there and i grab the hand you can see that i can now especially if i turn off my overlays right there so i'm hiding all of my bones you will see that i compose my character and over here if i turn on overlays again and grab the hand ik bone and turn off overlays you can see that i can grab that bone now normally you would leave overlays turned on while you're animating let's go and see what my foot looks like i'll grab the foot ik bone and move it up and you can see it's deforming the mesh and i can move and pose and animate my character while in pose mode i'll press ctrl z to undo that move as for the shoulder pads of my knight character they are a separate mesh object and therefore i'll have to parent them separately or in their own step to the appropriate bones so i'm going to select my bones again i'll select one of them in pose mode i'll press a and then q to clear out the transformations that i've done now i will point out that these shoulder pads created by the original artist have a mirror modifier on them that means that the shoulder pads actually are just one and not both of them if i turn off this mirror modifier you can see the only one that actually exists is the character's left one but with a mirror modifier it made a duplicate and flipped it over to the other side that's wonderful it turns out that's actually quite nice the armature modifier and yes when you add an armature as a parent of a mesh the mesh object if i go under the wrench tab actually gets a modifier called the armature modifier and if you turn this off well the armature will no longer control and pose the mesh at all so you have to have that armature modifier in your modifier stack and enabled now what i've actually done here is something that's not great i have my character mesh with a subdivision surface modifier on it that means i've made it more complex i've made it smoother by adding this modifier before i added the armature modifier and that's not ideal normally you'd add the armature and then subdivide your mesh to make it smoother so your armature has to only control a simpler version of your mesh so keep that in mind in this case my shoulder pads they have the mirror modifier the artist who made this character use the edge split modifier to make the edges of it i suppose have harder or sharper edges that's fine i'm going to select that mesh hold shift select the bones in pose mode just one of the bones is fine control p and with automatic weights let's see what that does if i grab a shoulder pad bone and i rotate it you can see what it does you'll notice that not everything is perfect when i grab a shoulder pad bone and tap r it's pulling mostly the right vertices in my mesh but some of them aren't perfect we'll talk about that briefly at the end of this video i'll press ctrl z though as for my character's helmet i don't need to deform with multiple bones i don't need to bend any elbows or shoulders or knees so i can just take this separate mesh object and parent it directly without any deformation to a single bone to do that i can select that mesh hold shift on my keyboard select that individual bone in pose mode make sure that you only have that one bone selected so i can just click on that bone if i press ctrl p now i'm not going to use armature to form with automatic weights instead i'm just going to select bone so i'm making the mesh a child of that individual bone in that armature so i'll click and so now if i grab that bone just that bone and i tap r it just has that helmet mesh stick to it okay same thing with divisor i'm going to select the visor hold shift select the armature but i'm going to just select i'll click on that bone to make it the only bone selected ctrl p bone there we go if i grab just that bone and rotate it you can see how it works i might want to constrain this bone to only rotate on the correct axis because i don't want to do something like you know that with that bone so what i can do is with that bone selected under the side panel your properties panel the n key on your keyboard we can turn off rotation that means we can enable these little locks on i believe the y and z axis so if i use my rotate tool and i rotate my character's visor can i rotate it in any way that i don't want to no it's stopping me from rotating it in bad ways it'll only let me rotate on that red x-axis because i left that one open okay that's a little tip for you there i'll press ctrl z or q and all there we go is my entire character finished and is it perfect no if i grab the controller bone which did i forget to turn off deform on it yes i did i should have turned off to form on that controller bone before i parented my entire character mesh to the armature that was my mistake there we go but if i grab that controller bone i move my whole character around well we'll talk about the sword in a moment but his buckle was a separate mesh object so i'll press ctrl z in fact i'll press a and then q and all i need to make this deform with the mesh as well so i'll select that mesh do i have any modifiers on it i've got the subsurf modifier on it to smooth that mesh out i might do this properly i'll get rid of that and so it's no longer smooth and it has no modifiers on it i'm going to hold shift and select a bone in my rig it doesn't matter which bone it is at all and then i'll press ctrl p with automatic weights and so now hopefully it will bend at the correct spot and does it if i move let's say my foot up using my foot ik bone it's looking not too bad okay i could go ahead now and select that mesh and under the wrench tab i could add that subdivision surface modifier back to smooth out that mesh again that would be the more correct process here i could select my mesh of my character sword and without even having a bone in the sword it's a separate object after all i could just make this mesh a child of my ik hand bomb so i'll do that i'll select this mesh hold shift select that bone with shift selected just that bone yeah there's no other bone selected there ctrl p and i'll make it a child to that parent bone so ctrl p just to the bone itself so now if i pose i'll just use my select tool here if i pose or grab that hand eye k bone the sword moves along with it okay now in terms of how your character mesh overall is controlled and deformed by your overall character rig not all might be merry in the world it might not work exactly as you would like in my case if i pose my character in such a way that the shoulder pad is rotating if i zoom in on that part of my character mesh you can see that these little straps that are controlling or holding on my character shoulder pads aren't exactly deforming in the way that i would like uh over on the other side maybe there's a more drastic problem there you can see that if i rotate that shoulder pad that you know it's stretching in a weird way it's going into the strap into the body of the character and it's not holding on at the base there these are all very minor things but you might have larger problems where when you made the overall mesh a child with automatic weights of the character armature it might not have assigned all the right vertices to the right bones in your armature in fact if you select the character mesh and press tab to go into edit mode and you select a single vertex in the character mesh you can go over to that side n properties panel or you can press that little arrow right there and go to item and then you can see a little section here called vertex weights you can see that this vertex here is controlled by the shoulder dot r bone the arm upper bone and a little bit by the arm lower bone as well and you can actually see the weights how much of a percentage in decimal form that vertex is controlled by each of those bones you can see that this vertex is actually controlled 0.0 that is zero percent by the shoulder bone that's fine eighty percent by the upper arm bone and zero percent maybe there is a decimal that i can't see yeah they're not exactly zero so you can see that each vertex has a weight under the object data tab for the mesh so this little triangle mesh here you can actually see under vertex groups all of the groups of vertices that were created when you went ctrl p with automatic weights and these vertex groups are named the same as your bones in your armature all the bones that have that deform checkbox checked unlike hopefully all of your ik bones they should not be listed here because you turned off the form for all of those hopefully but you can see that if i select oh let's say the pelvis vertex group and i deselect everything all my vertices over here so i'll press alt a on my keyboard if i'm in vertex mode of my mesh and i select one of the vertex groups and i press the select button it will select all of the vertices that have any influence at all by that bone in this case the pelvis bone i'll press alt a on my keyboard to deselect all what is this bone called bone well did i not name the controller bone down here i might have forgotten to do that so what happens if i select that group and press select aha it does not seem to select any vertices that i can see and that's a good thing for me in fact i'm going to press tab to go back into object mode i'm going to select that bone that that bone is just called bone i should probably call it uh controller there we go you will make mistakes along this process rigging is not something that you will do perfectly on the very first try or even after many tries you will still make little fumbles along the way and that's fine it is a learning process but if your character mesh is vastly wrong in the way it's controlled by individual bones let's say that your arm bone is accidentally pulling the wrong parts of your mesh if i select my mesh there is a special mode called weight paint mode and this mode right here under the mode menu of a mesh object is exactly for correcting problems like this where you have vertices that are controlled by the wrong bones so with a mesh selected if you go to weight paint mode you can see that it'll show you when you have a bone selected in pose mode what vertices are controlled by that bone based on their color this mode like its name implies also lets you paint the weight to your heart's desire and this is a bit of an arduous manual process one that i have not done enough practicing with myself just to note that if you are in an objects or mesh objects object mode to go into weight paint mode you should first select your armature and make sure your armature is in pose mode so when you're in pose mode and you've turned off lock object modes under the edit menu and you're not in x-ray mode so you can actually select a mesh then if you go into weight paint mode you can then select different bones in your armature and see the weights when you're in weight paint of the mesh how do you select different bones in your armature when you're in weight paint of your mesh well you hold control on your keyboard and you can then click on a bone okay this bone has no waiting on anything except for i believe what's in the shoulder pad which is a different mesh but you can see the waiting on different bones i'm holding controlling and clicking if let's say i had my lower arm bone selected and i use this paint brush tool which is the circle right now under my mouse and i painted uh weight onto some part of my mesh that wasn't appropriate like the side of my character now right now i actually have the brush that i'm using this little icon here is actually a menu for different brushes normally you'd be painting with the mix brush i believe which lets you paint adding or subtracting weight to or from a bone onto different vertices in your mesh so you should use the mix brush and this will let you add weight to your selected bone and so right now if i were to go back into object mode after just clicking and dragging on that part of my mesh now this part of my mesh these vertices are controlled by that bone and that's a bad thing so if i go back into object mode and then i select my bones and go into pose mode if i were to oppose my character you would see that you know the wrong part of the mesh is being pulled by the arm bone and that's not a good thing so what i could do to fix this is select my mesh make sure i'm in pose mode of my armature but then select my mesh and go into weight paint mode and then hold ctrl click on different bones and figure out that oh this bone has vertices that it should not be controlling with a weight blue by the way means that there is no weight on those vertices to the selected bone so there's no control and these areas are fine in blue obviously red means totally controlled by the selected bone so now if i paint with this mix brush a weight of zero that means i'm assigning zero weight to these vertices where i paint and i suggest that when you're using weight paint mode that you go to a solid viewport display and that'll make the shading i think more even in the way that you can see all the colors on your screen so let's go ahead and finish this off i'll paint all of these back to a weight of zero as for the shoulder pads of my character if i go back into object mode and select the shoulder pad objects i'll turn off x-ray mode and go back into my material preview shading mode here if i clear out i'll go back into pose mode of my character armature and i'll press a and then q and clear out all the posing of my character's bones here if i select the mesh of the shoulder pad you can see the mesh of the shoulder pads include the straps and if i were to pose the shoulder pads you can see that it's not stretching the straps in a nice way so let's go and see if we can fix that using weight painting so i'm going to select the mesh that's that part of my character the shoulder pads both of them now remember that i have that mirror modifier on this mesh before i have my armature modifier that's going to come into play here and it's actually quite a nice surprise that this works so well in blender if i go with that mesh selected into weight paint mode and i hold ctrl and i click on that shoulder pad bone you can see that well that bone is controlling this whole mesh but not entirely so i'm going to paint a weight of 1 and that means that that whole section will be controlled entirely by that bone you might want to go to the brush menu and turn on or off front faces only and so if you have that unchecked you should be able to paint you know through a mesh although i'm not sure exactly how that works properly what i will want to do though is make sure that these straps and the little buckles that hold the straps to the character's body are not entirely controlled by that bone because we don't want these little buckles or snaps to go into the character's body so i'm gonna paint with a mix brush with a weight of zero and i'm gonna paint away influence on those two little sections there i think it was okay but if i don't have those vertices in those little snap sections assigned to any bone they won't follow along with my character so i'm going to hold ctrl and select this shoulder bone and i want to make sure this shoulder bone is controlling those sections so i'm going to paint with a weight of one and just make sure that they are being controlled by something okay i might want to subtract any influence from these sections not shoulder bone maybe that bone that section there and i don't need these upper sections at all i want to have some blend though and that's why it is acting like we're viewing like a rainbow up the path a little bit but that should act better now one thing i've discovered is that when you have the mirror modifier on a mesh that you're controlling with bones that also have dot ln dot r it should act nicely and mirror all the painting that you do on one side for the other you'll notice that there's a little lighter orange spot on the top here that i've painted in that way just now and there is a matching color lighter spot on the top there and if i go and look and compare you can see that the colors match on both sides and that's because of that mirror modifier okay how does it work if i oppose that bone the straps are doing nicer things that looks pretty good i'm liking it okay it's not perfect but for the sake of this video i think those sections are done so i think there we have it if i go back to object mode and i select my armature and i go into pose mode and maybe i'll hide my side panels here i can pose and animate my character if i press a with a bone selected in pose mode to select my whole armature i can clear out the pose maybe i want my character to have a little animated wave so i could select the hand ik bone by the way if you want to hide the hand bones that you do not need to animate anymore at this point you could select those bones that you don't want to see more so i could select the smaller inner hand button i'll turn on my x-ray mode if you don't want to see those anymore you can actually go to the armature object data tab and you can move bones into different bone layers this way when you put a bone onto separate layers over here and if you want to do that you can select a bone and press m for move to different layer if you press m on your keyboard you can click on a different little square in a matching grid so m and now we have a dot on this layer and that means a bone is there that bone that i've just moved is now on that layer and i can leave that layer turned off that means it's going to be invisible that means i don't see it or accidentally selected as i'm animating so if i want to go ahead and select this smaller hand bone m to move i can move it down to that lower layer it's now out of the way and out of sight and out of mind and won't distract me or maybe select the wrong bone so m and then click and then the smaller bone here m and click right there so now if i want to animate my character i can simply put my character where i want them to start maybe their hand will go up there i'll double tap r to rotate and r to rotate i will tap i on my keyboard to insert a keyframe a location and rotation keyframe perhaps on frame one this is the basics of animation here if i go to a later frame let's say frame 15 and i move the hand down and then rotate the hand there and i tap i to insert a location rotation keyframe for that bone on that frame we have a little bit of animation there we go my character is saying hello right there to you last but not least we're going to make our bones look a little bit nicer in our viewport this display the way that the bones currently look in my viewport have this little pointy look for each bone and that's good for setting up your bones initially but most professional artists and animators prefer to have custom bone shapes we're not going to get there in this video but i will show you that under the armature tab if i go to the viewport display section with a bone selected in pose mode or maybe even just an object mode i i believe if i go to viewport display under the armature object tab and i change my viewport display as from octahedral which is this shape to stick well the bones appear like sticks and this might be less obtrusive this might be easier to select and see how your character actually looks so if i scrub back and forth in my timeline i can see my character better another common option that you will see a lot that has many benefits is the b bone shape b bones are essentially uh square cube bones that you can make as thick or thin as you want if i have b bone option display as selected i can select all of my bones i probably want to be in edit mode for this if i press ctrl alt s control alt s will let me scale the thickness of individual bones to whatever i want so if i have all of my bones selected like i do right now i can make them all thinner if i want to make some bones thicker to represent the size of that part of my character maybe the head is a big thick object i can press ctrl alt s and make just the head bigger just like that okay so that's an introduction to different bone shapes but i think that's gonna be it for the end of this video i'm gonna go back into pose mode and scrub back and forth and say goodbye to you that will be it for this video as always thank you so much for watching my name is colin if you like this video or if you've done something in it please go ahead and click on that like button below this video it really helps with me and my channel and gets these videos more seen if you want to see more videos like this one in either blender or in the ghetto game engine go ahead and click on that subscribe button and the bell icon below as well check out my facebook and my instagram pages in those two places i post sneak peeks and previews of what i'm working on next for this channel and it's where i communicate with all of you the most except here on youtube of course but that'll be it for this one thanks again for watching i'll see the next one bye [Music] you

Channel: BornCG

Views: 36,281

Keywords: Blender, tutorial, lesson, 3D, model, modeling, rigging, bone, skeleton, armature, IK, Inverse Kinematics, character, animate, human, body, pose

Id: iZBLtooU2Cs

Length: 85min 26sec (5126 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022