Rigging a character for a walk cycle in Blender

okay welcome back today we're going to read an entire character and put in some inverse kinematics chain what I'll do is work with the character we've already used and get you from the point of a static model to an animated character that's were walking along with a rig inside it alright so let's get started okay so here's our character we have to put an armature exactly in the center of this area here so shift s cursor to selected you have to have the object selected now you add an armature a single bone so there's the armature in the middle of the character it's not visible in here so we just turn on over at this panel over here turn on x-ray so we now can see the character armature inside the character it's only a single bone for now I'll leave that alone now in edit mode for the armature we can start moving this armature around to suit the characters proportion so I put the the root of the bone at the base of the hips and then extrude using e up to the top of the chest so roughly in line with the shoulders and then in a side view I'll extrude one for the neck and extrude one for the head so that's our Center back bone now we have to turn on on the side menu here T for the side menu scroll up to the top and options we want to turn on access mirror x-axis mirror because now we're going to start our arm and our leg extrusions but we wanted mirrored so we shift e to create that one and we shift E to create the beginning of that now we don't need that turned on or if we leave that on we just hide that menu leave it on and now from here on we want to extrude down for each of the chains of limbs one is the arm and we want to make sure that the elbow is placed a little bit towards the this side of the mesh this side of the mesh there so that the arm has some bend in it which is always good for a bond chain to have some initial bend in it rather than being very very straight the one thing I'll do is add a hand extrude the hand we could continue to add some fingers which either is a few ways to work with fingers we can either extrude so the starting point of a finger is there there there there and there each finger begins at those little crosses but so I have to get a bone across to there to start the finger chain now either I can extrude over to that point and then keep extruding for that finger and then just delete that bone so that that bone is now linked to that bone but it is offset because you can see you can see there's a dotted line there that that means that bone is offset but still linked it has to be linked to the hand so I'll just Deline these bones properly for the thumb very very quick the next one will mean an extrusion to this point at the beginning of the knuckle and continuing along I want to create another bone chain for that finger keep in mind that each of these fingers has a orientation and using control ah I can change the orientation of the bone chain using ctrl R so I just want to make sure that the front face the front face this face here of the Barn has has is facing the front of the mesh okay so now I can delete that bone there because I don't need it I will extrude another bone too just in order to begin the finger the central finger extrude to the knuckle and extrude down to the end of the finger tip of the finger just reposition these bones just tweak my bone roll so that the bone is facing in the correct direction then I can delete that bone so that the bone is linked you can see from that dotted line so in continuation of that work just extruding to continue the bone chains and delete that bone change the bone role and adjust just the position of that bone so that it's up towards where the knuckle would leave that bone roll needs to be facing more like that so grab that bone again extrude out to where the pinkie will start that's where the pinkie will start roughly and now extrude for the knuckle extrude for the rest of the finger I'm only having two bone fingers for now because I don't need I don't need it in this animation exercise I'm not going to need the anymore flexibility of my fingers but your characters might need more flexible or less flexible fingers this depends upon what character you're rigging for alright so that'll do for the for the hands our continuing along the legs I've got much simpler legs or just that's where the hip bone will start approximately in the center of the center of the character hip and now extrude for the knee extrude for the calf and extrude extrude for the foot and then extrude for the toe now I just want to make sure those bones are in alignment that's the ankle there so that has to be in the center of the mesh that bone needs some bone role adjustment just to line it back up with and that bone also needs some bone adjustment a great idea is to put the bone towards the front of the knee not towards the back of the knee because if you push the bone chain towards the front there is them now there is some bend in that bone the bone has bend in it and so it's a great idea to have a little bit of initial bend in your bone chain so that the inverse kinematics solution will know how to bend that knee properly all right so just positioning that bone towards the front so there is some bend there and that's my ankle and there's my toe bone lines up with the foot and we're done that's the skeleton okay now the first thing I want to do is turn on pose mode and I'm going to select my up so that the bone can be posed you can just quickly test your mesh there to see if everything's linked correctly if I move that around you can see that that's broken so back into edit mode select those two bones and then this final bone here and hit ctrl P and I want that to keep offset so that in edit and in pose mode the whole bone chain gets taken along so that those two bones are effectively linked to that bone with offset okay so there's our skeleton the next thing we want to do is make sure our eyes go for the go for the right so select those eye mesh and then select that bone that skeleton will need to be in pose mode so I select that bone and then like a control P and I want to link to bone so that those eyeballs are now linked to the bone now the next thing I want to do is link the mesh to the bone system so I select the mesh then select the bone system doesn't matter if it's in pose mode or object mode then I hit ctrl P automatic weights so now the mesh is bound by armature modify you can see on the meshes modifier there is now a new armature modifier that there and that armature modifier will allow you to move this bone chain around accordingly great so that's a quick rig we just do a quick test on in pose mode to make sure each of those bones moves that's all moving correctly it's all moving correctly and and it seems to be fairly well rigged for a forward kinematics now when we move I'll just quickly put a box down so you can see a floor plane so we're character will stand on the floor when we move that character up and down we want the feet to stay on the floor we want that's the floor so we want the feet to stay there but at the moment these leg bones don't have that option because it's a forward kinematics chain we want to put an inverse kinematics chain in so the first step for an inverse kinematics chain is for us to disconnect this bone we have to alt P clear parent or alt P disconnect bone so in in pose mode the bones are completely broken we've completely broken that link so that those bones are disconnected from this bone that's the first step all right the next step is to select the car and go over in pose mode we have to be in pose mode I have to go over to the barn constraints and choose inverse kinematics and that puts an inverse kinematics onto that chain but we have to plug in some values now so we're going to choose the armature we have to choose the bone where's the bone well it's the foot bones we have to make sure that this foot bone is named correctly so we can find it there's the name copy and we'll go back to this and we'll paste it in there there it is there so with that foot bone is now pasted into this area here now the next thing we need to do is set that to - that's very important that's set that needs to set too because if you don't set this to to the bone chain we'll won't be able to know how far to calculate if we set it to three you can see that the whole hip starts to go for the right here we don't want that we want only this bone chain to calculate to the hip so that only needs to be set to two all right so if it's a two joint leg if it's a three joint leg you might need to change it to three all right so we have some while we're also getting some mess deformation here I'll fix that now to fix that you just get rid of that armature modifier and rebind it to the mesh automatic weights so hopefully it's not maybe because of the mirror modifier or if we apply the mirror modifier get rid of the armature rebind the mesh automatic weights now it should be fine so that leg is now using inverse kinematics to hold the foot down on the floor so we just quickly do it again for the next leg select that bone go to bone constraint inverse kinematics select the armature then we select the bone name so we have to make sure we know what that bone name is there it is just rename it to foot so we can find it go back here find look you can type it in we want the right foot so now that's selected and then we want to set that for - okay close some menus there we have a complete like a solution great alright so the first thing we're going to do with this eye case solution is set up a walk cycle we'll walk on the spot so we need to open up a time line so click on the little triangle to open up a time line so we have a time bar there and the next thing we also want to do is set the time to be 24 frames long home so we have a 24 frame walk cycle okay the other viewport we want is a dope sheet to drag out another one and set a dope sheet because at the moment we don't have any keys in there but this is where the little keys will work when we start operating on our dope sheet the next thing we need to do is turn on this little key down here and that means it will set keys automatically so from a front view let's go to our first frame which happens to be 1 to 24 1 24 is actually a 23 frame cycle so we want naught north to 24 is 25 frame cycle we want a 24 frame cycle so leave that alone just to remember about naught and the end frame whether or not that's that's usable for you as your character might want want to walk faster or slower than that so you have to make that time longer by adjusting adjusting this in this value all right so first pose for any walk cycle is the contact point and we'll just set that contact point up the contact point of just push the arms in like that I'll get myself a new window so I can see the character from the side and the front same time the contact point is where the heel will strike the ground first so we're just posing this character you can see there's a little there's a little keyframe appearing in this this window so that means the character is now keyframed that that little key won't appear unless that's turned on okay so the arm is opposite to the leg we'll relax these fingers in a little bit obviously we don't want to too much young space fingers out for the sake of a relaxed walk cycle okay once we have a let's just key all of those by pressing I and in only rotation once we have that we are able to copy the pose and then paste it on to the opposite side of the character by pasting mirror so all I did was copy that pose and then paste it to this side of the character so that I'll undo that all I did was copy the pose and then paste it to the other side and so the other side has that same pose as well which is good for opposite sided bones it won't work on the central column but for opposite sided bones it's great to get poses that you may have already made with your hands all right so that's my contact pose and in order to make it a looping cycle we want to copy that pose up to frame 24 we'll keyframe we'll go back to frame 1 and keyframe everything so location rotation and scale and then just copy that up to frame 24 which is about there so that we know that that frame is the same as frame 1 and so it will loop then go to the center frame which in this case is 13 it flows to move my keys down the timeline 1 turn it to frame 23 and 0 I just reset my I just reset my timing it would be frame 12 that would be the opposite whatever is the halfway point the halfway point is the opposite is the opposite post so we could either use a combination of mirror posing or just do do the manual pose I prefer it if as students you get used to posing your character quickly because it's important to be able to identify which bone you're working on and what does it do on your characters rig so start playing with the pose here I haven't done anything with the hips on the other one so you can start to see the characters animating I'll have to recode repose the I have to select all the bones and shift D to copy that up the timeline so that is the beginning pose and that head is as to face forward okay so we have the beginning pose which is called the contact points the contact points for the right foot the left foot and the contact point for the right foot so we try to make these strong poses as best we can I just and anytime you adjust the first pose you have to select all the bones and select the keys and copy it up to the timeline all right so that's our walking pose we want to turn that to aliasing so it walks to full full speed obviously that's just the contact points now the next pose we have to put in is the passing pose so which foot is passing which foot will this foots passing that foot so we'll lift that foot up lift up the hips put the other foot onto the ground where it's supposed to be maybe the hips came up too high okay that's the idea the passing pose is where the foot passes the other foot and then that's the next contact point there the next passing pose this is the foot coming through so we have to pose that lifted a bit lift the hips and push that other foot down onto the ground because that foots supposed to stay on to the ground as if as if this other foot comes through passes we're not doing any work on the hips just yet so I'll try to keys of those in on the passing poses okay so there we have the passing poses you're starting to get to the the beginnings of a walk cycle that foot there it's kind of landing in the wrong angle so we want to land it like that because I'm working on the first pose I want to make sure that the characters copied up to the end which is shifty copy that key up to the end so it does loop and that foot goes back twists because I didn't pay any attention for that pose while I was working on it and because that twists I have to just adjust those poses from the front view and that's an acceptable walk cycle at the moment now obviously there is some more work I can do on this it's a very boring walk cycle it's just contacts and passing pose so just to add some more screen space I'll close that up and the other thing you can do to help you animate because a lot of this is very busy with bones I can quickly go to my skeleton and change it to wire my skeleton panel properties panel and I can change it to Y envelope B bone or sticks a wire is the least messy so you can see your character is as you work all right so the next pose would be the weight pose the weight where the weight is completely on to the ground so it does this sort of the weight comes down off that foot so that's the oppose immediately after the contact and I'll do that on this side of the character as well so that's one two three frames halfway between this one and this one we can put the foot flat to the floor and just a little bit of weight to the left onto that leg so you can now see the characters got a little bit more weight on its walk cycle and it lands on its on it on its weight the once the foot contacts on the ground it starts to look like there's a little bit more weight into the character the other one is another pose you can add is this pose which is the weight pose it's about halfway between the passing pose and the next contact so this is called the raise the raise pose and you just want to lift the body weight up a little bit just to keep that foot on the ground but lift the body weight up Center the weight so that the weight starts to come across the body and do it on the other side of the body as well obviously has to be bet halfway and there isn't a halfway point there so we have to push those keys out either one way or the other so it's a 24 frame so I call nought 23 is 24 so let's figure out where that's going wrong naught that's four frames that's six frames so that's actually seven frames because you've got one so you can push that out one more space that so they're all evenly spaced now just going to make sure it's evenly spaced to sake of your ability to see which pose is which so there we are we have a character that's walking along it's a little bit wobbly so you just have to go and figure out where that wobble is coming from I have to hide that and the other one we need to work on there that that's it I need to just have to push that weight forward you can see that the hips are moving side to side here in that kind of motion okay and I'll just delete that you can see what where is that there it is delete that layer actually unwittingly animated that so you can see the character is heads very stiff so you just go to each of these frames and pose the head how you would during during the animation it's a little bit stiff but that's just a matter of playing with these key frames along here to get yourself a reasonable looking walk cycle so that's it that's all we need to all we need to do for now and you can adjust those key frames as you need

Channel: James Neale

Views: 46,220

Keywords: charactermill, neale, james, kim, character, mascot, mendola

Id: 2d1TGl-492k

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2016