Rigging a Character with Duik Bassel in After Effects

[Music] hey everyone Morgan here from school of motion and in this tutorial we're gonna take a quick look at doing a very basic character rig using the new do ik facile now do expand around for quite some time but this latest update to do ik Bassel is really amazing and provides a whole new set of tools and a whole new procedure for rigging characters in After Effects and it's really a game changer in a lot of ways now we're gonna do a very basic straightforward rig here but if you're interested in learning a lot more about rigging characters and After Effects please check out my rigging Academy course at school of motion so let's take a look at the character we have to rig here this is Moe grin whose name sounds suspiciously like mine and who looks suspiciously like me designed by the amazing Alex Pope now let's take a look at the way this character is broken up the arms are broken up into upper arm forearm and hand pieces and note that the upper and lower arm and the hand they all overlap each other with perfectly circular overlaps and those overlaps are indicated by these marker guides here that we're going to be using as part of the rigging process in rigging Academy we talk a lot about prepping artwork but the basic idea is especially for limbs knees ankles wrists you want to try to have perfectly circular overlaps between the artwork whenever possible this is going to give you the greatest range of motion it's also a good idea to create these markers to mark where those circular overlaps are and you'll see why once we get a little farther in here the legs are divided with a thigh a calf a foot which is basically the ankle the heel up to the ball of the foot and then a toe layer sticking off the end there and once again all of these have the circular overlaps that we talked about now in this case we're using a jointed torso in other words we've separated the torso into separate pieces now the truth is that I don't generally recommend this it's often not really very possible especially if you have complicated or textured artwork and it's usually better to use the puppet tool when you're rigging torsos but for this simple lesson we've created a very simple torso with separate pieces we have a pelvis piece a belly piece in the middle there and then a chest piece sitting on top and then a separate little neck piece right there we also of course have the head which in this case is just one layer if we were gonna be creating facial rigging we'd actually want separate layers for all the different facial features and then precomposed together but for this simple rig we just have a single head layer as before we've created circular overlaps for these torso pieces and this is one of the reasons why I generally recommend using the puppet tool because it's often very difficult to get these kinds of circular overlaps depending on the design and artwork style of your character now in order to rig up this character we first need to create a structure for the character now Dueck basil's structures are one of the most exciting innovations of this new update structures are basically bones and skeletons that we can rig and then attach our character artwork to this emulates the way 3d rigging works where you create a skeleton and then connect the mesh of the character to that skeleton in Dueck Basel these bones or skeletons are called structures in the Dueck basal window the structures tab is this very first icon here this little sort of jointed arm icon and you can see that you have a lot of different options here and do it allows you to create any kind of custom skeleton you want for animals or monsters with three legs and four heads or whatever crazy thing you want but since so often you're just going to be creating a basic hominoid character there's a great single button click here that will just create a full skeleton for a hominoid with one click so for our character here that's all we need so let's just go ahead and click hominoid you'll need to be a little patient as Dueck basel creates the structure okay and you can see our simple skeletal structure here with two arms two legs and then a spinal column right through the middle and what we want to do now is organize our layers a little bit so we can align our structure to our artwork now there's a lot of different ways you can organize your layers if you want you can leave all of your structure elements all together on top of your artwork elements but I like to actually bring the structures closer to their artwork layers in the layer stack and color-code them to match the color coding I have for each body part like I always say it doesn't really matter how you organize your compositions and your projects it just matters that you do organize your projects and your compositions so to start with we have the structure elements that will be the left leg so I'm going to click and drag those down above the left leg artwork pieces and we'll color code those green to match those then we have the structure elements for the right leg I'm going to click-and-drag those down put those on top and color code them you get the idea I'll fast forward through the rest here just to save some time the next thing we need to do is align our structure layers to our artwork layers and this is where those markers come in so let's start with the right arm I'm gonna solo just the structures for the left arm and the markers for the left arm now remember again these are showing us where our circular overlaps are for our arm pieces and we want our structure layers to pivot right in the middle of those circular overlaps so we have nice clean joints with a wide range of motion so I'm going to zoom in a little bit here and what we're gonna do is hold down the command key to toggle snapping on and we're going to snap the anchor points of these structures to these markers you'll note that there's an additional layer at the end of the armed structure called the armed tip and we want to position this at the end of the hand so we're going to turn the hand layer on just temporarily and we're just going to click and drag that arm tip to the end of the hand now just to keep things nice and neat I'm going to zero out the X value in the position here just to keep that aligned along with the other structure elements now we can go ahead and turn off those markers and let's take a look at aligning a leg because it's a little different than doing the arm it's a little more complicated so let's look at the right leg here and once again we're gonna solo the structures whoops I mix these up here let's just change those really quick I accidentally put the right leg pieces with the left leg so let me just swap those out turn those green and we'll put these up on top and turn these yellow okay so once again we're going to solo those right leg structure elements and we're gonna solo the markers now you'll note that there's an extra piece here we have the the tip of the toe which is like the arm tip we looked at with the arm but there's this additional piece which is the heel and those have to be put in a very specific place in order to create the foot role controls that are auto rigging is going to give us but initially we can just snap our pieces to our markers just like we did with the arm you now that we've snapped these main pieces to our markers we're ready to snap the tip toe and the heel elements we're going to start with the tip toe and what we need to do is turn on the toe artwork and we want to zoom in here and align this anchor point to the very tip of the toes right there at the very tip then we want to align the heel to the back part of the heal artwork right where it meets the ground and once we get this rigged up you'll see why it's so important to place that tiptoe in that he'll in those exact places okay so now we've seen how to align arms and legs to save a little time I'm going to fast forward through the other arm and the other leg and we'll just get those lined up real fast okay now we're ready to align the spinal column to our artwork now let's take a look at the spine structure really quick and make sure we understand how it relates to the artwork the hip structure will control our pelvis the first spine structure will control our belly art workpiece spine - will control our chest the neck of course will control the neck the head the head and then the spine tip is just going to be placed at the top of the head just like we place the arm tip at the end of the hands so let's solo those structure elements and let's turn on the marker guides now we have a marker guide for the joint between the pelvis and the belly and between the belly and the chest and the neck and the head but we don't have anywhere to snap the hips to the hips are going to again control the pelvis but they're also going to control the thighs of the legs so what we want to do is we want to place those hips in between the thighs so we're also going to turn on our I'm gonna grab the hips and I'm gonna first snap it to the pelvis marker here just to get it centered and then I'm gonna hold down the shift-key and I'm gonna click and drag it down and then I'm gonna position it in between the tooth I piece --is now I don't have to be like super scientific or measure this out or anything I can just eyeball it but by snapping it to the pelvis marker first I at least know it's going to be in line with the pelvis and the chest and the belly then the rest of these spine pieces can just be snapped into place so we'll grab spine one here and snap that to the center of the pelvis marker will grab spine two and we'll snap that to the chest marker then the neck of course we will snap to the neck marker the head structure to the head marker and then we can just turn the head artwork on and just make sure that the spine tip is positioned here at the top of the head and honestly doesn't really matter very much exactly where that sits just as long as it's near the top of the head okay we can turn off those markers and unsolo our layers now and now we've got all of our structures aligned to our character now before we actually rig the structure we can go ahead and parent our artwork to the structure so when the structure elements move they move the correct pieces of artwork so let's start down at the bottom here and this will all be fairly straightforward the left arm we parent to the left arm structure the left forearm to the left forearm structure and the hand to the hand structure now really quick note about right and left here you'll notice in this case this is not the characters left it's the left side for the viewer well that's honestly because I flipped this character right before importing it I usually name a character's limbs right and left based on the characters right and the characters left but I've worked with plenty of character designers and animators who prefer the opposite ultimately it doesn't really matter because you're very likely to flip a character within a scene anyway and you'll notice that do ik Bassel doesn't deal with right or left at all they just have died and thigh to arm and arm to and so on so it doesn't really matter you can really name things how you want to just as long as it's organized and it makes some sense okay let's parent up the left leg so we're gonna take the left toes to the left toe structure the foot to the foot the calf to the calf and the thigh to the thigh pretty obvious we'll do the same with the right side here we'll fast forward a little bit now when we get to the torso here we want to be a little careful because the layering of the artwork is by necessity a little different than the layering of the structures so the neck to the next structure the head to the head structure remember that the belly is going to go to the first spine structure the pelvis goes to the hips structure and the chest to spine - and then we can speed through the right arm here all right now our artwork is connected to our structure now we're ready to rig the structure now one of the most powerful aspects of Dueck Bassel is the auto rigging system the auto rig is capable of looking at almost any combination of structures whether they're heavily customised or very basic and creating an effective rig for those structures with a single click now as we talked about in rigging Academy there are some drawbacks to certain aspects of auto rigging and so we look at both auto and manual rigging so that you can really truly customize a rig to exactly what your needs are but in most cases the auto rig works great and it's particularly good for very fast turnaround projects where you need to get a rig put together very very quickly now the auto rigging is so powerful that we can actually rig this entire figure with a single click so the first thing we need to do is select all of our structure layers and we can do that with this handy select structures button here so now all of our structures are selected and then we just need to go to the links and constraints tab in Dueck Basile and simply click right at the top auto rig and that's it we've rigged our character now we still need to take a few steps here to make this rig a little easier to work with so I'm going to start by just closing up these layers here and you'll notice we have this whole set of green controllers here up at the top your default color might end up being a little different now these controllers allow us to drive the rig but they can also be customized to make the rig a little easier to work with so I'm gonna start with this first hand or arm controller here and note that when I click on it I get this whole set of controls and the effects controls here if I tab open icon you can see I can change its color its position size and orientation and opacity now even though you can change the color right here I actually prefer to use a slightly different method for changing the color of controller icons and that's because I like to use a color coding system for my controllers and I recommend you do the same I like to have one color for the left or right side one color for the opposite side and then a third color for centrally-located icons so before we adjust some of these other settings let's get our color coding in place so I'm gonna select the hand and the foot on this side of the character and it really doesn't matter whether it's right or left I just want all of the controls on this side of the body and I'm gonna go to the create controllers tab in Dueck Bassel and I'm gonna go down and choose edit you'll notice I have a color option here and I'm gonna click on the color option and that brings me to the system color picker and the reason I like to use this is because then I can create swatches that I can just quickly click on to grab specific colors so let's put red on this side of the rig and notice it changes both controller icons red let's do the same with the other side I'm going to select those choose color and on this side I'm going to choose purple and then we'll leave the centrally-located controllers green now I'm also going to color code the layers themselves so these are purple controllers so I'm going to color the layers purple and I'm also going to move those down to the bottom of the controller stack because they're at the bottom of the stack of the character if we think of these limbs being closest to us the torso and head in the middle and then the leg and arm in the back they're the furthest away from us and again this is just the way I like to organize things you can organize them the way they make the most sense to you just as long as you have some kind of organizational system in place then these two on top which are red we're gonna color those red and we'll leave the others green now let's also arrange these so they're a little easier to work with as we're animating so I'm gonna start with the hand controller here and I'm gonna move this away from the figure just a little bit now you notice that as I move this away the Anchor Point stays in the same place so I'm still controlling the arm from that same anchor point this position control is basically an offset to simply offset the icon itself and this is again very much a personal preference I like to get the icons a little bit away from the figure so I can focus on the artwork of the figure without having icons sitting over the top of everything I'm gonna round this number up to 450 here I think the size is all right you want the size to be something that's going to be easy to click and drag on but then I also like to turn the opacity of controllers down a little just so they're a little more subtle and again our focus then can be a little more on the artwork of the character itself finally we have this option down here for display you'll notice this little kind of string we can see here and here that's indicating our Ike a connection for our inverse kinematics but it's really not necessary it also slows down the performance of the rig just a little so I like to uncheck that and remove that little guide that's again up to you now while we're here we should also test this out really quick I'm gonna pick up this little arm and whoops look at this notice that the elbow is bending the opposite direction of what we want so I just need to come under here under ika hand and click reverse and now the orientation will reverse the other direction that's what we want make sure you use command Z to undo if you move a controller until we've zeroed out these position values we don't want to lose our neutral values before we begin working with the rig so you can see how easy it is to create a custom position size color what have you for your controllers I'm going to go ahead and speed through the other arm and the leg controllers feel free to set yours up however it makes the most sense to you [Music] now with our torso controls I like to move the head and the body control which controls the whole upper part of the body off the figure and to the back of the character kind of like the handles of a teacup so you grab the handle from behind to manipulate that body part this is again a personal preference but allows us again to have fewer icons on the figure itself I usually leave the shoulder and neck controller and the hip controller over the character because they're a little smaller and don't interfere quite so much so let's start with the head here I'm going to also make the head controller a little bit larger let's do a thousand percent and I'm going to move it off away from the head and up a little bit as well and then I'm just going to round these numbers off nope a city down again and now we can see the face of our character the artwork isn't covered up by this icon the shoulder and neck controller I'm just going to lower a little bit again to kind of keep it off the face just a little bit more well maybe make it just a little bit larger so again it's easy to click and drag Han and turn that opacity down the spine curve allows us to add a little bend in the middle of the torso I'm gonna just blow this up a little bit so it's a little bit larger again easier to click and drag on now maybe even a little larger than that and we'll turn that opacity down we'll also uncheck draw guides it'll also clean up our interface just a little bit on that spine curve control the spine route is really not necessary for control of the character it's necessary for the rigging itself but we don't need to use this as a click-and-drag controller so I usually just turn the visibility of the spine route off then before we adjust the hips let's grab the body which again controls the whole upper part of the body and let's again move this off the figure in that teacup or a coffee cup handle style and we'll move that up a little bit so it's kind of sitting roughly centered in the middle of his back and let's also make this quite a bit larger easier to click and drag on and then finally our hip controller which I'm just going to move up a little bit and we'll increase the size a little as well so it's sitting right over that pelvis area and we'll turn that opacity down now we can also turn off the visibility of our structures now we don't need to look at those structures anymore so I'm going to go to the create structures tab select structures and show/hide and that's gonna hide all those structures away we don't need to see those anymore now we also want to clean up our layers a little bit here so we're focusing on the controllers and not all this other stuff that goes into creating the rig so I'm gonna toggle to my switches here and I'm gonna start just after the controllers and I'm gonna shy away all of the layers aside from my controller layers and we can also shy away that spine route because that again is not one of our click-and-drag controls that we need and then I also want to make sure that when I'm manipulating the character that I can only click on the controllers and I don't accidentally move any artwork layers so I'm also going to lock all of the layers aside from the controller layers so we're gonna lock all of those up now when I hit the shy button here all those layers disappear and now the only layers I can click and drag on are our controller layers now before we start manipulating this character it's really important that we capture these neutral values because right now if I was just to look at the position value of this hand it's just too complex x and y values that would be impossible to remember plus it makes it hard when creating animations to essentially start from such a crazy value here so what we want to do is we want to zero out the position values of all of our controllers so I'm going to go to the links and constraints tab here and let's just see how this works I'm going to open that position value again and notice we have the add zero button here I'm going to go ahead and click that and you'll see that what happened is the position value becomes zero but it doesn't move the position what happens is Dueck Bassel creates a null object with the same position value as this actual layer and then parents this layer to it allowing us to zero out the position that null object is hidden and shied we can see it down below here there it is zero hand so that when we have shied our layers it disappears and this allows us to have that nice zero position value rotation values default to zero of course so our neutral position for this hand is all zeros it's very very important to an efficient animation process so let's go ahead and do that with all of these controllers and you want to make sure and do this before you start manipulating the controllers so you don't lose those neutral values okay and our rig is all ready to go one last thing that I recommend you do is hide the parent and Link column that'll just give you a little more screen real estate in your time line okay so let's just really quickly walk through our controls here and let's just make one small layering adjustment let's put the head on top of the shoulders and neck that's just a little bit more intuitive okay so the head control allows us to rotate and control the head the shoulder and neck control controls the upper part of the body from the shoulders to the neck and up into the head the spine curve allows us to create a little curvature within the torso the hips allow us to position [Music] and also to rotate the hips of the character and then the body control allows us to control the entire upper part of the body from the hips upward the hand and foot controls obviously control the arms and the legs and you can rotate the control of the hand in order to control the rotation of the hand the foot controls have some additional controls added to them let's close these up a little and take a look at those you can see these foot roll controls have been added and these are really neat let's zoom in here a little bit and see how these work the toe rotation allows us to rotate the little toes there the tiptoe rotation allows us to raise the foot on its tiptoe the heel allows us to roll the foot back and down if we want on the back of the heel and the foot roll this is the really powerful one here which is great for walks and runs and dancing and other complex movements that allows you to roll back on the heel but then roll forward on the ball of the foot to tilt up on the ball of the foot so it rolls the foot back and forth and again this is very very important for animating walks and other complicated foot movements I can of course also just pick up and move the foot and I can rotate the foot off the end of the calf but the foot role controls allow us to control the foot when it's sitting on the ground and this is very important to maintain the sense of gravity with the foot sitting solidly on the ground and rolling on the toes or the heel or both while the weight of the character is still down on that foot so this gives us very robust control over our character now just FYI I'm not going to bother with it in this tutorial but if you want you can change the names of these controllers to make them a little more simple to indicate right and left or whatever you want so you're not stuck with these name these controllers can be renamed if you wish now if you have Auto rigged your figure the way we have here you also get the wonderful advantage of the procedural walk cycle tool which is a terrific feature here in Dueck Bassel now as a long time character animator the procedural walk cycle leaves a little bit to be desired if you want a really high quality very expressive walk but again for a quick turnaround where you don't have time to set a lot of keyframes this is a very powerful tool so let's take a look at how that works I basically just select my controllers and just click walk cycle and now if I do a ram preview here of just a second or so you can see that my character is walking pretty amazing it's quite honestly a fairly stiff walk there's not a lot of feeling of weight to it but there's a tremendous number of parameters you can adjust in order to change the feeling and tone of the walk I'm gonna move the icon for the walk controller just off the figure there just a little bit now again as an old-time character animator I would personally want a little more control over a walk but if you're in a fast turnaround situation this is super cool and let's take a look just really quick at just some of the parameters and there's a lot of them you can really customize these walks quite a bit under main parameters here you can adjust the feeling of weight of the character the energy of the character which will kind of change the amount of sort of stiffness in the walk so let's take a look right now we've got our energy at 10% if we increase that to 25% you can see we've got a quite a bit looser and bouncier walk the softness will make the character more loose and then under walk cycle here you have a walk speed and you can also change the type from realistic to a kind of bouncier dancing walk here it's essentially a Mickey Mouse double bounce walk for you animation aficionados here we go now there's also a ton of secondary controls that allow you to control the amount of movement and the neck the softness you can adjust how much the hips swing or the body swings you can change how much the arms swing or don't swing how high the feet pickup and how much they rotate lots and lots of parameters to customize this walk to get it as close to what you're looking for as possible and again it's very very quick and easy to use the general motion allows you to start and stop the cycle slowing in to and slowing out of a walk really very powerful and very quick again for those fast turnaround projects so I hope you've gotten a good overview of how to rig a character with Dueck Bassel now if you want to learn more about animating a rigged character like this I recommend you sign up for my character animation boot camp at school of motion which is a very intense course that will give you a terrific background in the fundamentals of character animation specifically using rigged puppets in After Effects and if you want to learn more about rigging as I said try my rigging Academy course which will go much deeper into the rigging process preparing the artwork building rigs from scratch as well as Auto rigging and customizing rigs to do all kinds of amazing stuff now for a little sneak peek at the kind of more advanced and customized rigs you can learn about in rigging Academy here's just one of the many rigs you can learn to create in the course this is another character designed by Alex Pope and there's quite a few additional features to this rig starting with the hands here if we select a hand you can see there's a lot of additional controls for the hand including a hand selector that allows us to select different hand poses there off the end of the arm and we also have the ability to turn props on with this character so we can hold a variety of props and when we pick up and move the hand around he picks up and moves those props as well and he can hold a few different props we have a prop selector as well so he can hold a guitar and he can hold a little bottle of beer there we even have some prop offset controls so we can move the props in his hand and pose them in different ways and these arms can also move in front of and behind his body so if his arm is in front here like this and I want him to say hide the skateboard behind his back I can check this little box here and the arm and the skateboard goes behind his back and this works with or without the props this opens up a lot of additional posing options for this character when both hands can be behind the back or in front so he can hold his tummy if he's hungry or whatever now we also have some facial rigging here although he doesn't have a mouth does have eyes obviously and so we have this I aim control that allows him to look around and he can also wink or blink with these sliders here so he can open and close both eyes or have an eye halfway opened or closed and he can even squash and stretch his eyes so his eyes can squash and they can stretch to create more expressive movements and the blinks all work with that squash and stretch control he even has individual pupil controls so if you want to create like cross-eyed looks or like crazy eyed looks you can get that with the individual pupil controls so a lot of expressive capabilities in his face here now one of the things about Auto rigging that I don't entirely love is the way the torsos are rigged with the auto rigger so this character has a manually rigged torso that's set up just a little bit different some of the things are the same we can rotate the head here I've also got the ability which doesn't happen automatically with the auto rig to also move the position of the head manually in rigging Academy we'll look at how to do that both with Auto rigs and with manually rigged torsos but it's a nice additional level of control have a body control which I call the CEO g4 center of gravity that's following the general naming convention for 3d rigs and that again controls the upper part of the body from the waist upwards the pelvis control is the same as the hip control and that allows us to rotate the hips and also move them around in position but where things get a little different is here in the upper part of the body where rather than having a neck and shoulder control which I find a little restrictive and not entirely anatomically correct instead with this rig we have a chest control and that chest control essentially controls the ribcage of the character so when you bend that you're bending basically the ribcage and having control over the ribcage or the chest and the pelvis separately give you a lot more posing possibilities for the torso the mid-level control here controls the curvature in the middle of the body basically where the belly is and then the neck is controlled separate by this little rotation control here which allows you to bend the neck and again this gives you a greater level of control over the torso neck and head and it's also a little more anatomically correct now this is still just scratching the surface of what you can learn in rigging Academy we'll look at lots of different ways to prep and manipulate the artwork both using jointed pieces and the puppet tool we'll look at creating lots of different types of facial rigging hand rigging and the rigging of quadrupeds and you'll learn a lot more about the rigging tools and Dueck Bassel so you can really get the most out of this amazing free tool for After Effects so I hope you've gotten a lot out of this tutorial and I hope to see you in character animation boot camp or rigging Academy in the future

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 163,357

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, Rigging, Duik, Bassel, School of Motion

Id: 07wfQa8h-y0

Length: 41min 53sec (2513 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 25 2018