Rig a Low Poly Character in Blender 2.9x

in this video you're going to learn how to turn this low poly character into a rigged character so you can animate them either for blender animations or if you want to put this character in a game [Music] check out the other video where i actually model this character from scratch if you want to learn that one first because i made a separate one creating this guy from scratch and then you can watch this video again to do the rigging alright so why would you even want to rig a character to begin with well it's not really much fun having a guy sliding around in a t-pose all day so we have to create a skeleton for him so we can actually animate those with keyframes and have the arms and legs move in or even turn them into a rag doll if that's what you want to do and we're going to start by creating the armature i press 1 on the keypad to go into the front view here make sure i've got no object selected here and make sure the cursor is in the center here as well at the feet very important also the characters center should be at the feet here we model this character with its pivot point down here at the feet good practice to do it that way because then it's easy to position the character in a world so make sure that pivot point and the origin of the character is at the base of his feet and also this uh 3d cursor now if the 3d cursor is not there maybe it's over here press shift c to reset the cursor and then i'm going to press shift a to add an armature and that creates a big fat bone right at the bottom here and slides it straight up the first thing we want to do when this bone is selected is go to this little tab here called object data properties but it looks like a running man go into viewport display and tick in front and that will show this bone through the body and you can see if i press the middle mouse button now it's actually in the center but it looks like it's showing it in front all the time and then i press tab to go into edit mode for this bone and we've got this armature up here selected i'll click with the left mouse button on the bone press 1 on the keypad and then i'm going to slide it up now and there's a few ways to do that g i usually do but it's difficult to keep the center here you can press z to force it into the movement of the blue z axis here then i'm going to put the balls where they go and then click on the tip here and then you can either enable this little move tool here or press shift space and g that's a shortcut for that slide it down we're going to have a little pelvis bone here or a root bone that's for his hips and then i'm going to press e to extrude this bow now and press z to lock it into the z axis and this is going to be a spine bone that we're going to put there e to extrude one more time and then z to lock it onto the z axis and this is going to be the upper part of the spine and then i'm going to skip the neck i'm just going to do a head for this one so i'm going to e to extrude this one z and then up to the top of the head here now when i use the middle mouse button i can rotate and see that it seems to be pretty good in the center of this body here click a bone here and press f2 to rename it this one i'm going to call it root usually that's a common word for the root bone click on this one press f2 and name it spine 1 click on this bone f2 spine 2 click on this bone f2 and this is going to be called head now we need arms and legs so i'm gonna click on this little joint here between the upper spine or spine two and the head press one on the keypad or in the numpad and e to extrude this one down and sometimes or usually i create a shoulder bone as well i'm going to do that for this one so i'm just going to extrude this one down to where the arm is going to pivot so about here and then e to extrude to the elbow and e to extrude to the hand and then e to extrude to here it's not so picky with the up and down so i didn't lock it to any axis now you can even click on one of these joints here and press g to refine these a little bit if you need to click on this one g to move that up maybe it's there what is important however is that you want to make sure that you pick this elbow joint and move it back slightly just a little bit like this will do and it's because if it's straight locked like this and uh it could be a little bit tricky to animate it because the it's called an ik solver or inverse kinematic solver it doesn't really know how to fold the elbow if it's perfectly straight so just put that little little bend there that'll help a lot later on okay we're going to do the same for the legs now first of all oh yeah that one's connected so we'll rename this first press f2 shoulder and here you should always do period or dot full stop l because that's his left now his left shoulder and rename it dot l because then we can do automatic symmetry later on then blender will know how to translate that into a right side so the same for this one click on it f2 upper arm dot l dot l very important click on this bone f2 lower arm dot l and then here f2 hand dot l so that's our arms we're gonna do the legs now so click on the ball by the groin one to go into front view e to extrude it and we'll just do it straight down roughly like this not too picky on this one click this bone and press g to move it and we're gonna put it where his hip is gonna be roughly there click on this bone or this joint here g to move that down to where the knee is it could be a little bit tricky to see where we put the geometry for the knee so do alt z okay that was no good maybe we'll do a z and do wireframe and we see we want to move this all the way down to here to the center of his knee g move that one down to there maybe and e to extrude keep this wireframe view if you find that one easier maybe and then that's going to be the lower leg and then e one more time and then we can lock it z if we prefer on the z axis and now when we look from the side i'll press three on the numpad make sure we want to put a little dent on the knee as well just that we did for the elbow so it knows how to fold this leg later on we could move this joint back as well to there maybe and the foot we don't really want to have straight down so take the tip toe here press g and move that down to the tip of the foot because that's where it's going to pivot later on okay we can do alt z again to disable see through and press z and go to solid again if you want to have it like this and we need to rename this so click on this bone f2 upper leg dot l this bone f2 lower leg dot l and then f2 foot dot l there's one more thing we want to do before we mirror this and that's we want to set up inverse kinematics and that's really good for especially for legs when you keyframe and animate the character you don't really want to have to change as you lower his body weight down you want the legs to bend automatically you don't want the legs to come down with him most of the time so you have to fold the leg manually it's really tricky to keep the feet planted then so we're going to set up something called inverse kinematics before i do that i want to go to front view here one on the numpad press a to select all the bones and in this view now in edit mode press shift n and do recalculate role on the view axis it doesn't look like anything happened here but it actually helps a lot when we do the animation later on because then it knows which way to roll the bones if you want to do symmetry like you want to flip a pose from like this to this by having the roll angle that'll help out now we can go three on the numpad to see the side here click on the knee joint and press e to extrude this one just a funny bone like that click on the heel joint here as well press e to extrude that one looks really weird at the moment but i'll tell you why this one we need to do alt p and clear parent and then press g to move it this is going to be called what's called an inverse kinematic pole bone and basically it's nothing else then it needs to have this bone so it knows where to aim the knee so when it folds the leg it wants to know in which way should my knee face so that's what this bone is going to do it's going to help us we also have to do this go to the bone here when this is selected and deselect deform otherwise it might try to deform this mesh later on using this bone and we don't really want the knee stretching forward here same thing for this bone click on it do alt p and clear parent but leave this one just where it is but we do have to go to the bone here and deselect the form just the same way and then we're going to rename these bones so click on this one press f2 and then name this one ik leg pole dot l click on this one do f2 ik target dot l that's going to be a target bone we've got a few more steps to do for this leg inverse kinematic we do i click on this lower leg now and then press ctrl tab and go into pose mode now we've got a few more things here on the right side click on this bone constraints properties tab and add the bone constraint and this one we're going to do add inverse kinematics on the target here you can click on this little dropper tool here and click on the armature and then on the bone we need to type this is going to be the target bone and we name this one conveniently to ik target.l so search for that one and pick that one up for the poll target we'll do the same armature and bone it's the p-o-l-e and then here we go pole target see how it flipped his foot out to the side now we can fix that by changing the pole angle here you can slide it or type it in and since we did the roll angle from the front view we need to type 90 here on the pole angle and that'll get the foot to face forward again and if your character is funking out now mine isn't because this i forgot to actually connect this upper leg bone to the body here if i press ctrl tab make sure i've got this select again press tab into edit mode so we're out of post mode but in edit mode and if i move this leg now this there's no dotted line here so we need to connect this leg to his root bone here so i'll make sure that i select this upper leg first shift select his road bone press ctrl p and do make parent but keep offset and that created this little dotted line here and that means that his leg is now connected okay now we can go back into the pose mode so i'll press ctrl tab and go to pose mode and select this joint here and that's important here the chain length needs to be set to two because it's only going to affect this bone and this bone here what we've done now when we've enabled inverse kinematics is that if i click on this bone and enable this little move tool and press g you can see that it's actually moving the leg now and if i click on this bone and press g it actually folds it down but we've got a problem with the foot because as he kneels down our as he squats he's the foot is tip toeing down so we have that's pretty much the last thing we need to fix for this so select the foot bone here and go to the bone tab here click on relations and disable inherit rotation that was step one now when we move it it's like this but we still have a problem we can't really rotate the foot we want this target bone to control the roll of the foot so to do that make sure that this foot bone is selected go to the bone constraint tab again click add bone constraint and here we're going to do copy rotation for target we want to select this armature again we select the armature and here we want to select the target bone and if flipped it to the opposite side now we need to change the target to local space and the owner to local space that snaps it back and finally we need to do a few more things if i do r to rotate that seems pretty good if i do r around the z axis you can see that it's actually rotating the wrong direction so with this selected we need to flip invert z rotation now when we rotate on the z then the foot is rotated as we expect we might have the same problem with the roll so if i do r to rotate and y you can see when i rotate this right the foot is rotating left so we need to do the same thing i'll select this bone again and invert the y axis now when i click on this one and rotate it it rotates the same it's a bit quirky but you'll get used to that one okay now when we drop if we select the torso again here and do or the pelvis and drop you can see that the foot is nicely planted as he bends down and the knee is pointing remember this one if i move this to the side you can see that it's pointing the leg to that one this is ready to be symmetrized now so press ctrl tab to go out of that mode out of post mode make sure that the armature is selected here and then just press normal tab to go into edit mode again press a to select all the bones here and now you can press f3 and type symmetrize and armature symmetrize here and that automatically since we named the bones dot l for left of all the legs and arms stuff then it's actually automatically mirrored this into the other side and now the final step is just to press tab to go out of edit mode select your character and then shift select the armature and press ctrl p and then we want to set parent to armature deform with automatic weights and i think blender is usually really good nowadays to get this automatic weight going properly we can select the armature here press ctrl tab and now if we try to drop him down select the torso g to move it and the hat is not moving because it's a separate object but the character is moving good we can also try rotating that and we've got an issue now with the eyes and that's because it didn't really know how to pick up those as separate objects here so this is a good opportunity to learn how to fix that if something we can check the other parts here as well the other limbs our arms working pretty good rotate the elbow here and could have done maybe some more geometry around the wrist to get less deformation there but it's pretty good if you want to move the leg out she got some maybe excessive deformation here of the belt that we could get rid of g to move on rotate the knee and if you want to hide the armature you just click on this little eye you can see how it looks so we've got a few things that we could tweak the leg seems to be affecting the belt a little bit too much and the head is not affecting the eye enough we'll enable the armature again press a to select all the bones alt r to reset all the rotations and alt g to reset all the movements we'll fix the first part with a belt down here with what's called weight painting and weight painting is every vertex now if we're going to tab out of control tab go back into object mode select this character press tab to go into edit mode and press one to go into vertex then we can see these verts here and basically these verts have a value now that's linked to a bone that's what this automatic weight thing did so on item here with this vertex selected i can see that it's picked for the root bone here it's only put 0.031 effecting the spine it's affecting it a little bit more and the upper leg is affecting it quite a lot and that's something we don't really want to do and it could be a bit tricky here to edit these manually so usually we do this in what's called weight paint mode to go into weight paint mode press tab to go get out of edit mode for this one select the armature first from scratch here and shift select the character and go from object mode up here into weight paint and that turns in blue like this and and it shows you how the vertices are assigned to different bones i'll shift-click and select the bone it's very important that you hold shift if you want to select or deselect bones like this but it's very important now if i select this bone we can see that the torso is affecting blue is nothing cyan or light blue is a little bit green is a little bit more yellow is more and all the way to red that's the 100 how much it 100 how much it affects it so we had some issues here where this leg bone i'll do shift and select this bone and shift deselect this one first shift select this one active and we want to reduce the amount that the leg here is affecting the belt so we slide the weight up here now down to zero pretty much and then we can just start painting here and see how that color goes back to blue that means we're removing the weight now so i'll just colorize this make sure we take away everything on the belt here i pan with shift and middle mouse button okay that should be a little bit better since we're still in mirror mode i only have to do this for one side i'll go back into object mode select this one control tab into post mode and g to move this one and we can see that that looks better now it's still affecting a little bit too much on the inner side of the belt but you can refine this now with the weight painting technique and add and remove the weights now remember that the color blue is nothing and all the way to red is 100 how much this bone should affect avert for the eyes we're going to do a slightly different method because we know that they want to be 100 linked to the head for this one i'll press ctrl tab to go back into object mode select the character again and press tab to go into edit mode on the character while the mouse is hovering over the eyes now i'll press l to select the linked vertices here that selected everything that was linked to this eye very handy way to select geometry that's detached from something else and now i'm going to go up to vertex and go to vertex group and i take remove from all that means that these vertices are no longer linked to any bone at all no weight whatsoever because we want it to be 100 affected by this head bone now so i go back into vertex vertex group which is the same actually i can press ctrl g to get into here and i'm going to go set active group i'm going to select head and then we'll do ctrl g again and make sure that we do assign to active group now you can see here with these verts selected we can see that 100 or 1.0 which is 100 is connected to the head now tab out of edit mode select the armature control tab to go into post mode left click to select the head and r to rotate and now we can see that the eyes are following good with the head 100 the ears could have suffered the same problem but they seem to be all right okay we had a problem here i accidentally added the vert here that we had we must have had this vert or i did i'm not blaming you now i had this verge selected by mistake you'll do loads of errors on and off don't worry about those it's all about learning how to fix those control tab out of edit mode of the armature click on the character tab into edit mode and then i select this vertex here and you can select see now that i've actually got assigned 100 to the head here so first thing we're going to do here is remove the head of our weight here altogether so this one's not linked to anything now so with this one selected shift select another vert that you want to copy it from and then click on copy and now when we go back it's transferred all the way from there to this one so that should work pretty good now we can clap out of edit mode select the armature control tab into post mode and g to move this one that works good and make sure that the head is not affecting down there anymore so there's ways to fix it if you screw up for the hat to follow the head we can do it differently since that's not part of the same object we can't wait paint that one so select the hat and go to this object constraints properties drop down this one and do child of pick the target and pick the armature and then here this one we want to do head and see that the hat disappeared now and put it over here just click on set inverse and that'll bring it back to here now when we animate the character i'll select the armature control tab select the head press r to rotate then the hat will follow along with the head all right in this video you'll learn how to rig a character and set up the armature so it affects the low poly character so make sure you hit that subscribe button if you want to see a future video where i'm going to take this guy and we're going to keyframe animate him into an idle pose a walk animation run animation and maybe even some fancy doughnut eating move it's a cop after all finally you can also check out my patreon page where the tutorial tier gets to download all of these files and many others that i've created through my youtube history until next video take care and i'll see you then bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Imphenzia

Views: 187,406

Rating: 4.9743342 out of 5

Keywords: blender, low poly, rigging, low poly character rig, low poly armature, imphenzia, blender 2.9, inverse kinematics, weight paint

Id: XkiWBSSuxLw

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021