Making LEGO Animations in Blender - Part 2 | Character Design and Rigging

hello everyone welcome to part 2 of my lego blender animations tutorial series and today after last episode where we looked at how you can import your bricks into blender today we're going to be looking at character design and rigging rigging for animation I'm going to show you how you can make your characters that you can use for your films for your renders for this tutorial series what I'm going to be doing is I'm gonna be actually remaking in Lego a scene from the mandalorian TV show throughout this tutorial series I'm gonna take you through the step-by-step the process of how I would go about on doing this now let's jump right into how you can make your character which in my case the mandalorian so what we're gonna be doing is you're going to open up the website mecha bricks calm just like we did last time except there's one issue for character we chosen most Lego characters are actually on this website but if we search up the mandalorian there is no actual Lego set for the mandalorian so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start from scratch I'm gonna go to make a bricks minifigures lower parts and I'm just gonna search through and here's the official Lego minifigure I'm gonna search through I'm gonna find a pair of legs that worked good for our character I'm gonna go with these legs these legs are very similar actually to the legs on the official Lego minifigure and the reason my car breaks doesn't have the mandalorian just because my DeLorean obviously just came out and it's not on there yet so now we're gonna go to upper parts and I'm actually gonna grab the upper torso of Boba Fett since it is a Mandalorian torso there it is I'm gonna click on that and I'm gonna drag it up so it's aligned with the legs what are actually gonna do now is change the clone of the arms to match the brown on the Mandalorian character as well as the hands alright so now we're gonna go through and add a head and for this we're actually just gonna add a standard gray head because Mandalore now if she doesn't take off his mask and his mask is gray so it'll blend in well and now we're gonna go find Mandalorian head under head clothing and we're gonna click on this head here this is the standard Mandalorian head because it's great and now I'm gonna search up because I'm and Lauren has a cape add that in in this cape I believe is gray so we're gonna leave that like just like that now we're gonna do is you're going to file export export as colada this way you can get textures to modify them and what we're gonna do is you can change the colors and I'll show you how to do that for both the torso and the helmet and as you go to those if Pablo we're also going to do is export it as blender add-ons MVX this is the actual model then we're going to be using it for the animation so now that you have both those two files downloaded it wait for that to happen and we're going to extract the zip file colada zip file with our textures in there and open that up delete this is it file we don't need that anymore open up in the Mandalore and go to maps diffuse and here all our textures we're gonna start with the torso open that up with Photoshop or or whatever photo editor software you have you don't need anything fancy for this all we're going to be doing is changing the green and the gray to match the brown and beige on the mandalorian figure so in order to find exact color we need in Photoshop we're gonna select and find what color we need in the mecha bricks the color is medium news rot or you get throughout a lot of pronounce it and now we're gonna go to the forum and we're gonna find a PDF under parts and decorations design under resources and there's this color chart and this has all the color codes for all the official like.oh colors and their codes so put into your software to get the exact color so we need 2 medium new got so I'm gonna start on medium new gothic or whatever perhaps it is and find that medium dark flush is the other name for it and we're gonna find the color code mecca bricks and there it is so I'm gonna highlight that command C copy that and now we're going back to photoshop we're going to paste this color into our color top and voila there's our color we need I'm gonna go with the paint bucket tool now I'm gonna plop that in just like that now we have our background now we just need to change the green so we're changing the green to this gray dark stone gray now highlight of the dark stone gray is that right there we find the color for that copy that go back to photoshop paste this new color code in there click OK and use the paint bucket to fill in all the green spots just by clicking line we're gonna save this as a file saving it to that same folder that we got it from now or to go through and do the helmet and the helmet all we need to do is remove the blue and the lighter gray that's easy we can just use the car picker to pick the gray in the background and then just fill in the other two colors and voila that is all now we're going to finally open up blender and this is where we're gonna use the 7bx file the mecca bricks file so delete the cube go to file import Bekaa brick stop 7bx now you're going to need to locate your downloads your zetas BX file make sure you click bevels this is very very very important as I explained in the last video import dot 7bx and voila now we have our mandalorian character inside blender but two things we need to rig it and we need to change the colors so as you can see if I going to look at that mode these are not the colors of the mandalorian these are the textures that we downloaded but we need to change those to the ones that we just made so for now we're going to change this to shader editor and this is where we can change our images that are on the models we're going to delete the textures that are already there as you can see now there is no texture on the helmet which is what we just X off make sure to select the right part and click open I go to the textures that we just created and we're gonna find helmet new and there you go import that and there it is that is our new helmet proper texture for the mandalorian in the TV now do the same for the torso and find the new torso that we just created torso new import that and there we go there's our Mandalorian character all proper textures these are the colors of the Mandalorian and he looks great but now need a riggan in order to make composable so we have a couple options here you can spend some money get they have a shop on mecha bricks but to rig it what we're actually going to do is not gonna download this we're gonna find a free one good to define the free rig go to blender bricks comm and this is a website that's still kind of under production but it's basically a website for all blender Lego enthusiasts upload and share their ideas and just go down and this little doesn't doesn't much on the site but there is two rigs that we can get so click the Left blast-off how to set up the minifigure rig and here is a little article written by Citron's animations it's a little tutorial section and here we have two types of rigs that you can download we have a basic rig and we have an IKE a rig which is more advanced and it's better for animation in our case since I'm gonna be going through animation we're gonna be downloading the icao rig the icater it just makes animations a lot easier because it will track the foot plants can move the torso forward while the legs stay in place to create a realistic walk movement or really any step forward movement so now we're a scroll down click on the advanced rake and then we're gonna download this we're gonna click this little photo here and it will download the rig for us so click on that save file I'm gonna click OK and there's a whole article here not with article and whole tutorial written out form of how to do this I'm gonna explain it in this video so you can either read this or you can watch the rest of this video where I'm gonna explain how you can set up the rig with your character there's a great image on that site which shows which bones of the armature you're supposed to parent to each object so we find that one file you've downloaded go to collection we're under append here so we're going to append the collection this is the entire collection now we have because see we have the rig here and all the rig shapes I didn't actually create this rig this current rig was created by su trans animations so big thanks to him for providing us for free so after you've appended the collection go to the collection on the top and we're going to turn off the visibility or in change out the rig we're gonna turn off the visibility for the rig shapes so underneath the collection we have bone shapes and we don't need to see those and we don't want them to show up in our renders we're gonna turn off the visibility on that and just admit w w we're gonna turn on these restriction toggles for everything and we're gonna turn them all off for their bone shape because we don't want them to show up in any of the rendering at all so as you can see if I are going to rotate the rig right now it is rotating but the obviously the parts are not following with the rig and that is because we have not parented these parts to each bone so in order to do this we have to parent certain bones to certain parts and also one apparently for example I want to parent the arm bone to the on part two we want to parent the torso part to the torso part and so on and it's a great image which I'll show on the screen right now on that website we were just on that shows you which parts to parent to which bones now I'm going to show you right now how you how you have prepared them so what you do is you're going to go to object mode click on the part first then shift click on the rig and you're gonna click on pose mode and go back to the pose mode you're going to select the part that you want to parent it to click ctrl P that'll bring up a menu and you click parents to bone make sure you click bone and you're it's going to go through and do all the other one now or see we rope if you rotate it now the arm will follow but only the arm not the hand though that is because the hand is not parented and we have to parent the hand so to do this click on the hand bone go back to object mode click shift click on the armature go it back into pose mode this is the same thing we did so click on the bone that you want ctrl P click bone now what you've done is you've parented the hand part to the hand bone which means that basically it'll follow all the rotation of the bone now I'm gonna go through and I'm going to do this for every single bone there are three bones in the whole rig that you actually don't parent anything to these are the AI cabe owns these IKEA bones are basically controllers when you move those they move other bones in a certain way that will move the part and if you are familiar with how to rig things you will know what I'm talking about but if you don't know what I'm talking about all you really need to worry about is looking at the image and parenting which parts to which bones and then after that I'll show you which bones you need to move to move which parts so as here we have all our bones parented to the parts and we also need a parent our Cape as well as our hips to the central torso bone and as you can see we go through and we'll test all the different bones make sure they're working properly the helmet rotates us well and I'm clicking Arturo teeth rotate these by the way hit auto rotate and everything's working just fine and this is the eye cable onto the legs you click G to move these guys click G and you move them with your mouse follows the other right leg hit G and move them and it's all working great and I'll show you a quick demonstration of how these rigs actually work so if I were to move hit G and move this left leg forward a bit and I click G on this hip bone and move that forward you can see it works just like a regular minifig where it moves forward and the foot will stay in place one thing we actually forgot was the gun for the mandalorian so I'll show you how to set up the gun so go back to Mecca bricks and look for the gun that you want to use so I'm going to go to library go to minifigures weapons I'm gonna use this pistol and you're gonna click on the hand joint green here then click on the gun and it'll put it in the right spot for you and so now I've deleted everything and just export as blender is it MPX with the Lego logo so now when you import this with the mecca bricks importer recommend alluring one that is the kind of your bubbles are on imported it'll just pop up right where you want it to be ideally would have done this with the character at the same time but I forgot so I did it now and parent what you do is they're gonna parent this one do the hand bone as well that's like control p on the hand bone and just like we did before now if we move the arm top bone everything with the gun is rotating along just like we want alright now our entire Mandalorian is rape and ready to go for our animation we'll cover that in the future that is it for part two in our series for making Lego animations in blender hopefully that tutorial was easy to follow leave a comment and what you thought of what I could do to improve my tutorials thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Owenator Productions

Views: 68,822

Keywords: lego, animation, tutorial, how to, blender, mecabricks, cinema4d, c4d, the mandalorian, baby yoda, stopmotion, brickfilm, rigging, blender 2.8, blender 2.81, tips and tricks, the 313th a star wars story, the 313th, 313th, 313, a star wars story, star wars, lego star wars

Id: mOAZDrCYq9o

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 28 2019