Rig and Animate ANYTHING in Blender

hey guys how's it goin Remington here and today I'm with you for a tutorial on how to animate and rig anything in blender now this is actually a really simple process and this was actually requested by one of my viewers so big thanks to you for requesting this I'm sure there's a whole lot of people so with this I'm just going to go ahead and rig this really simple model of a stormtrooper that I got off of TF three DM comm which is an awesome place for a bunch of them free 3d models for you to download and use whatever so this tutorial will pretty much cover the basics of rigging anything I'm just gonna be ringing a person for this in this case but you can go ahead and ring pretty much anything you'd like so let's go ahead and jump right into it i'ma switch out of material mode here or render mode I'm sorry because I don't really need to pay too much attention and here we can see our mesh it's really nothing too fancy it's just a low poly mesh of a stormtrooper with some textures on it and I set up some basic materials I'm gonna go ahead and turn on screencasting keys so that you guys can see what I'm pressing down here in the lower left so let's go ahead and start out by basically rigging our mesh because obviously you have to rig before you can animate so I'm going to press one to go into front view I'm gonna press five to go into orthographic view not an orthographic view I'm going to press shift a and add a single bone under the armature tab now when we add the single bone this bone is basically like a joint or like a I don't really know how to describe but it's like an actual bone in your arm and those balls at the end are joints if you can imagine that so over here in the armature setting is we're going to come over here and we're going to check x-ray and basically what x-ray does is allowed us allows us to see the bone through our mesh so you can see the bone is actually between the stormtroopers feet however if we reposition it we can still see it even though it's behind there now if we uncheck x-ray you'll see we can't see it but if we do check x-ray you can't see it and this basically just helps with positioning of the bones in addition we have a couple different options of how we want to display it you can either choose an octahedron a stick a B bone and envelope or why now my favorite is a stick because it shows the stick which is the bone and the little ball at the end and it provides the most precision because it's such a small bone so I'm going to switch back into front orthographic view here and I'm going to go ahead and position this right actually that's the perfect size for this model the goal is to have this bone stretch from the hips the top of the hips all the way to where the shoulders would be now it might be a little bit tall so I'm going to drag it down tad bit and by doing that I switched into edit mode by pressing tab and just drag this top node down by selecting it by right-clicking it so now what we can do is we can select the entire bone by clicking the bar in the middle we're going to press W and click subdivide now you'll notice we have two different bones we have one bone up top here oops I didn't mean to switch into orthographic mode or not orthographic render mode there and then we also have one bone on the bottom what we can do now is select both of these and press W again and click subdivide and now we have four different bones and this will make up our spine it's important to have a really flexible spine that way it doesn't come out looking weird because if you see somebody imagine seeing human bend in one spot on their back like a joint it's going to be really unnatural really funky and it's not going to look natural at all so the goal is to have I mean preferably you'll have like 50 bones but nobody's going to pay that much attention to it so I find four bones to be a good medium I guess so I'm going to switch out of edit mode and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch into side orthographic view by pressing numpad 3 I'm going to reposition this so it's right up against his back not right where a spine would be more towards the middle but kind of where his spine would be and then next I'm going to switch back into edit mode I'm going to select this top node I'm going to press e to extrude and we're going to extrude it up his neck to place it right at the bottom of where his neck would connect to his skull and then one more time straight up into head his head hunter in the head I'm going to reposition this just a little bit more just like that so now we have five I'm sorry not five six different bones we have the head the neck the three spine there the four spine spinal bones and that's about it now if you'd like to you can rename these bones so you can keep track of them by selecting them clicking the bone in the properties menu and naming this so this one will be head this one would be neck now I'm not going to do this too much because it's not really important for me to keep track of the bones if you have to keep track of the bones for using this for either motion capture or something else like that it's really important to name them that way you get the idea of what you're actually doing so let's switch back into front orthographic view and I'm going to select the bone or the joint right below where our neck is so it's not going to be exactly like where the neck begins but the one right below it we're going to go ahead and extrude this to the left into the right so I'm going to press E X to extrude along the x-axis and e.x again took through along the x-axis we're going to try and keep this as symmetrical as possible so I'm going to select both of these and I'm going to extrude them along the z axis and we're going to position these where the elbows would be and I'm going to press s X to scale it out we're going to just reposition it just a little bit and now you can see this acts as an upper arm bone now the reason that I said this will work for any model you're like wait a second I'm doing a cat why why would I do this for a cat all you have to do is follow the general anatomy of a cat so if you think of a cat a cat obviously has a bone running in its upper arm its lower arm it has a wrist it has a bunch of toe bones it has a spine you just have to place the bones where the bones would be anatomically correct so if I were to place a bone coming out like this a human doesn't have a bone that comes out like that so it'd be completely irrational now I don't really have to work worried about supporting bones like um like ribs and stuff because all of that those bones are more protective bones it's mostly bone bone bones that have joints connected to them that you have to worry about so now you'll notice if we switch into side orthographic view our our arm bones our upper arm bones are kind of far back because we want them to be for the most part centered so I'm gonna select both of them and I'm just going to push them forward just so they're nice and centered in the arm I'm also going to do the same thing with the shoulders because the shoulders are set a little bit far back and we want the shoulders to be as accurate as possible so I'm going to go ahead and extrude down the down to the hint or down to the wrists as well just like that and we'll leave the hands for now next thing we're going to do actually let me check to make sure you can see there once again behind where they should be so we'll reposition them and now the next thing we're gonna do is the hips and the legs so hips are really simple all you have to do is extrude across the x-axis extrude across the x-axis select both of them and then move them down a little bit and this basically just acts as I mean hips I guess for our 3d model it just allows a little bit more work or a little bit more room than just going straight down like that it allows us to tweak his a hip position a little bit more and it makes a little bit better so I'm gonna go ahead and extrude these down to his kneecaps and then switch and decide view make sure they're positioned correctly you're also going to want to move the hips forward a little bit just because they're more of a middle of the body kind of thing we're just trying to get them there we can also move the bottom spinal bones just to kind of squeeze them into the right spot here there we go all right we'll switch back to front view and we'll extrude these down once again all right position them and over the shin bone of the then four feet um if you want to go as far as animating or rigging all the toes and stuff that's totally up to you I never really do that because none of my animations really take that much work what I usually do is I connect this to the heel just like that and then I go ahead and connect it down the foot and then I do a little toe bone as well and that just basically allows us to tweak every single part of the foot now this actually came out pretty well a lot of the time feet will be angled in or out so you have to reposition these bones it's pretty good for me though so next thing we're going to do is the hands now hands are a tricky thing because you could either rig the entire hand or you could just leave it how it is and just do one hand bone or one bone that controls all the fingers in my case I'm just going to do one hand bone because it's extremely time-consuming to go ahead and do all the hands and position them perfectly if you do want to do the hands though what you can do is you can just have one bone go to each finger just like this and we'll have two joints in every finger just like that so this with the middle finger we'll start down here one here one here one here one here one here one here one here one here and you can see how that works that actually came out pretty perfect typically it's not that perfect however I'm just going to go ahead and delete this and what I'm going to do instead is I'm just going to go ahead and give it one bone going straight down to the middle finger and this will just control our entire hand and I'll do the same on this side and we'll just make sure that it's in the right spot and then our break is actually already finished now if you're doing some sort of animal you might have a tail I recommend doing the tail the same way we did the spine just extruding one long bone switching into edit mode and then pressing W and subdivide then position all the little nodes where they need to go in accordance to the tail um other than that you already have your rig done it's really simple it's really easy now all we have to do is parent the rig to our model itself so if we select our mesh by right-clicking it a hold shift and right click the rig it as well we can then press control P which is parent and we can select automatic weights now you can see I didn't get any error message up here if you did get an error message up here you might have to try a different mesh or you can do it the manual way if you can look up a tutorial on weight painting that'll guide you through it unfortunately mine didn't have any errors it usually doesn't have many errors and now what we can do is select the rig itself here and we can go into pose mode and you'll notice now we have just one bone selected we can select one bone at a time and it's blue which means you're in pose mode and you'll notice if we rotate it our bone moves just like that now you'll notice that his chest is kind of moving to which we don't want and I'll show you how to fix this in a little bit if we can try and move everything on his body we can see his head moves have some trouble moving those things which is going to be a problem so we'll fix those well his spine works pretty dang well his legs work pretty dang well his hips we're pretty dang well and we can also see that his hand now can flap like a butterfly and no finger movements but it's good to test out everything just to see what you're working with but then we're going to go ahead and make some fixes just so our mesh comes out to the best ability there to the best result that it possibly can because when you're moving an arm you don't want the chest coming out like that so I'm going to do is with both arms I'm going to stick the arm out straight just like this so it's in a perfect T pose I'm actually going to switch into front view to do this just so we can get the perfect T pose right here so now is in a perfect T pose and you'll notice his chest pretty much inflated to three times its size so what we can do is we can with the bone selected but you can hold shift and right click our mesh and in the lower left we can come down to weight paint now basically what weight paint does is shows and allows you to edit how strong of an influence each bone has on the mesh so you'll notice in the red spots that's where it affects it most and where it's in a lighter green lighter blue spots that's where it affects the least so you can see this one has most of it on the upper head and not much on the lower head but you'll notice that these are completely blue because they're not being affected by it at all so what we can do is I'm gonna go ahead and fix the chest right now I'm going to select one of the arm bones the upper arm bones and we have this menu over here if you don't have this menu just press T to pull it up and under the brush settings we're going to select subtract which will allow us to remove some of the weight painting some of the weight off of the actual mesh itself so all you have to do is click and you'll notice it starts getting a darker blue and the mesh stops deforming the way it does so I'm going to kind of isolate this to just the just the arm and you notice I'll change the strength over here just to make it a little bit more powerful in some places a little less powerful in other places and hopefully this will fix our mesh deformation problem that we're having and you can already see that this side versus this side this side has a lot more distortion on this side there's still a little bit over here that I need to take care of sometimes mesh is especially complicated mesh is like this one get to be a little bit tricky because a lot of little vertices don't like to cooperate unfortunately there's not much you can do about this all you have to do is just try and work around to the best of your building you can see that I'm now painting it back on by changing this to draw instead of subtract so I just want to make sure these edges are nice and red as opposed to whatever color they were before so now you can see it works pretty much flawlessly and you'll see it's kind of pulling some vertices up here so you honest when I rotate this pulling some vertices awkwardly that's what we want to try and get rid of and you can go around your entire mesh and do this I'm not going to do the entire mesh in this case because it's a tutorial I don't want to waste all of your time fixing this so now you can see there you go there's a little bit better arm or a little bit better of an arm it's still kind of buggy because it's a little poly mesh and it's going to happen if you're using a little poly mesh no matter what you try and do so that's kind of a problem I guess but you know what can you do that's really the best you can do so um the next thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna select a head here and you notice that we have these little things down here that aren't red at all because they aren't being affected so I'm actually going to do is tilt the head all the way back so we can get a full image or a full view of these little things and I'm just going to go ahead and go to draw and I'm just going to draw all over them I'm going to make sure to strike this set to one we're just going to draw all over them try and get them completely into place Oh work there we go I'm gonna actually color most of the head red as well because it's important that the head is all affected and not just partially affected a lot of this is going to require some experimentation on your own because you have to learn what type of mesh works what type of mesh won't work what type of rig will cause errors what type of rig will not cause errors and so it's tricky oops I had draw select did not subtract it's kind of tricky and it's one of those things that really requires some experience but after you get that experience down you'll come out with something that looks really really good actually so now you can see this will affect this completely and actually you'll notice that the neck bone is actually what's controlling these so I'm going to go ahead and paint these blue try and paint the entire head blue so the neck doesn't affect the head and doesn't work the head at all you want the neck just to affect the neck there we go it's a little bit better I find placing things there displacing things like really drastically like that you'll see what the main errors are and what you can do to fix them sometimes it won't work especially once again with these low poly meshes this is a really bad mesh that I chose for this but it's the best we can do now let's go ahead and get into animating and we press a a to select everything and press alt R to reset the rotations on everything let's switch out a weight paint mode and just select the mesh so now what we have is we have a bunch of these little bones that we can position and make our person do anything with pretty much it's that simple now this is good proposing but what happens when you want to animate it all you have to do is get it into pose you want so if I want them to be maybe I don't know let's do a quick little pose here we'll have them giving about oh there's another problem maybe you won't give them about um so yeah wait painting is gonna be a tough thing because of how how much editing you have to do I tried to do as little as I could in this in reality I'd spend about Moe there a lot of the time more times I spent making the rig in doing this so now that we have this all positioned what we can do is you can press a to select every bone to set our default pose press I and then press lock rot scale this will lock the rotation scale and location of every bone now we can go down our timeline you'll notice there's a keyframe right there let's go to fifty will say and what we can do is we can now close our person in a different pose see it's once again clutching because of the weight painting errors and now what we can do is we can press a a I la crop scale again now if we go back to the beginning and we play through you can see that he moves his hands just like that now of course animations will be a lot more complex than this you're going to have to make a walk cycle probably and a bunch of other things in addition we can also tweak things like the spine the legs and if you only want to move one thing so for example if you only want to move the head and you want the arms to keep moving in the pattern you don't have to go back and adjust the head and lock it here and then lock it there and select the whole thing and change it all you have to do really is just reposition it once will make them look up and with the head bone selected you press I and then lock drop scale and that'll just save the data for the head bones so now you see it goes back down because it had it selected there and now what we can do here is we can slide his head down like this we can also move this arm up like this and we'll select all these that we moved and save them here and now you'll see that only those bones move and if we need to we can now adjust things here and they won't follow the same path as that so it's see that it's just a bit better it's more professional I guess to do that that way you're not just getting a full body animation will come out a lot better and add a lot more customizability so of course this is just a very basic tutorial I'm not the best animator myself I'm okay at rigging um but you know it takes a lot of learning and I'm still in that learning process I mean I'm only 16 so I have a lot to learn animating is a very hard thing to learn I know from experience the best animation I've ever done was pretty crappy so I mean it's it's a big learning curve so best of luck in your endeavors with animating and rigging but that's about all I have for this video so thank you all for watching be sure to hit like if you liked this video and you found it helpful and be sure hit subscribe if you'd like to see more videos like this I upload every Wednesday and Saturday so be sure to stay tuned for that other than that I'll see you guys later adios [Music]

Channel: Remington Creative

Views: 890,548

Rating: 4.9291 out of 5

Keywords: motion, design, graphics, tutorial, how to, guide, remington, blender, cycles, education, how-to, rig, rigging, animate, animation, anything, animal, human, dog, cat, dinosaur, skeleton, armature, bone, pose, star wars, storm, trooper

Id: mhQY2_gVoVg

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2016