Rigging a Dog in Blender - Exercise Notes

welcome to this instructor notes video following up on the rigging a dog exercise when you open up the boxer dog model that you download from blend swap it should look just like this and we're going to take this file and apply a rig to it so one of the first things I notice is the dog is in the middle of the grid so I want to place him on the grid as if he's standing on it so I'm gonna go into a side orthographic view tab into edit mode hit a to select all of my vertices and I'm just going to GZ again this is an edit mode to move my dog with his feet flat on the grid floor this green line and so by doing it in edit mode it leaves the object origin at the center of the world here which is what I want okay so we don't need this camera I'll go ahead and delete it and as I go I might clean the scene of anything else that I don't need let's see I need an outliner panel so I'll pull that out of the top here and change it to outliner oops there's outliner there okay we have cube let's rename this to be dog model and it's got a material I don't really need that I'll just delete it again trying to clean the scene out of unnecessary things also at the bottom right I'll pull up another panel for my UV image editor where I can load an image that will guide us as we create the skeleton for our dog and so if I tab over to my finder I've downloaded a Creative Commons image that's actually of a wolf skeleton I couldn't find a good dog skeleton that was a Creative Commons image but this is the same basic idea so I'll be able to reference this as I place my bones which we are ready to do so in the side view again I can access that by hitting three and then five on the number pad and that gives me my right orthographic I'm going to hit shift a in object mode and choose armature single bone and I will rename this object from armature to be called dog underscore rig and I will leave the object so its object origin is matching our model right here at the center of the world and now we're ready to play these bones so select our dog rig object tab into edit mode and then perhaps Z for wireframe and let's start to move these points I'm going to start with the bottom of the spine or the tail end of the spine and let's take a look at the spine over here in our reference image where we can see many bones that make up the spine which gives it its flexibility but for this simple rig we're creating I don't need that many bones I just need to approximate the general structure identifying key points of articulation so I'm going to create one bone to be sort of the hips and then create another bone for the abdomen area and then another one for the ribcage and then we'll create three for the neck to give it a little bit more flexibility and then e to extrude one more pulling it straight forward in the y-axis to create the head okay now for the tail I'm going to grab our original bone hit shift D to duplicate it and use our active element pivot point to rotate that to be the tail and let's just create two bones here to represent the tail just for that little bit of flexibility and now all you need to do is create bones for the legs to finish this simple skeleton so I'll hit shift D to duplicate that original bone there's nothing special about duplicating the original bone but coincidentally it's just the one I keep picking and so I'm going to reference our leg bones here and that makes it easy to distinguish where I should be placing these bones I think right there extrude to the back right there extrude down to the hinge of the foot and then extrude straight forward or now we'll do straight forward I'll kind of make it match the angle of the foot like that okay I think that looks pretty good now let's duplicate this entire chain with shift D once they're all selected and it will serve as the bones for our front leg just placing these real quick and it seems that this bone in the shoulder actually or this arm and the shoulder actually has another bone like that sort of the shoulder blade okay I think that matches pretty well one thing that's annoying me is the white wire frame of our model object it makes it hard to distinguish where the bones are we can quickly fix that by jumping into our blender preferences under themes and in the 3d view this wire option right here instead of white let's set that to either black or even like a light gray or medium gray like that there we go it's much easier now to see our skeleton and so our bone placement looks good from the side but what about the front these should all be right in the middle yeah they are so we're going to move the front leg over to match the model straight up and down looks pretty good except for the shoulder blade we'll move that in closer to the spine do the same thing over here for the back leg maybe move up the first point of our bone chain in the back leg move that in X just a little bit like that okay great so we've established our skeleton or at least one half of the skeleton and so before I move forward with adding some constraints and controls I do want to name this skeleton properly and you should have already seen how to do this in the course so I'm just going to jump ahead with all my bones named okay so now that I've got those bones named I'm starting to rethink my spine positioning a little bit because even though it matches the reference image putting the spine bones higher on the back which is correct leaving room for all the organs underneath it it's not really gonna work well when we do our automatic weighting and so I'm going to reposition these bones breaking the anatomy a little bit and positioning the bones more in the center-of-mass for the model there we go not directly in the center but just a little bit closer and that way the automatic weights should perform a little bit better for us okay so at this point we're ready to creating the mechanisms for our skeleton which will be I cake install for the tail and I cave for the neck and other relational hierarchy things like for example right now if I tab to pose mode with control tab and select our spine bone I'm sorry the original spine bone and then move that our spine moves but our arms don't so our arms are not parented to the spine appropriately and so let's try and figure out where those should go I think that bone right there parent the shoulder blade bone shift control clicking on the spine bone tab to edit mode ctrl P and keep offset and now when I rotate that the shoulder blade goes with it but looks like this is not parented oh okay no it's not so I need to switch the direction of this bone first and so selecting it I'll tab into edit mode come down to the armature menu and then choose a switch direction or the Alt F key and now parent this bone to the shoulder blade ctrl P and we'll say connected and now that should work fine the whole arm should go with it I seem to have lost the parenting here let's try that again keep offset there we go that's what I wanted now the front leg goes with our spine I need to do the same for the back leg and the tail we'll just select those two bones tab in edit mode shift select our hip bone or the base of the spine ctrl P and keep offset okay so now we've got some fundamental hierarchy nailed down and so like on a human the hips are gonna be like the center of gravity sort of the root of a lot of movement and so now let's work on an IKE a constraint for our leg this should be repeated material if you've watched the course so you should already know how to do this pretty well but I will do one leg and then skip or fast-forward through the other one but then I'll show you how to add an eye K up here so that the neck behaves very flexibly but first let's start with this hind leg okay so my standard procedure is to e extrude straight out this is going to be our target and let's rename this just to stay organized back leg underscore I K - target and we don't need the numbers on the back end and so I'm going to hit alt P to clear the parent so now in pose mode that's just a bone floating off into space and I'm going to parent my foot bone to that new bone with keep offset and then add an IKE a constraint to this bone will do that in pose mode over here in the bone constraint menu let's add the I K or inverse kinematics and the target let's just select this bone here which actually only selects the dog rig and so we need to choose back leg I kate argot it'll turn yellow showing us that it's now a valid constraint but I need to change the chain length here to three okay now it extends up to the end of the leg and let's see how that functions in pose mode by moving this eye kate argot and you can see that that is the functionality that we're after alright pretty standard set up but I do need a pull target and so I'm going to tab into edit mode shift e duplicate that bone for the target scale it down a little bit and we'll name this back leg i capo get rid of the numbers and I will parent this to our IQ target as well keeping that offset okay now back to pose mode select the bone with rik constraint and we can select a pull target now and that oriented our entire leg awkwardly so it looks like about 90 degrees is the offset so for our pull angle let's try 90 and that's the opposite direction so maybe negative 90 let's see from the front it looks a little bit off-kilter so maybe shift control and then orient it like that there we go so about negative 87 now what happens when we move our leg let's hide our dog model for now we move our eye Kate argot which essentially is functioning as an entire leg control we can all so move the angle of the knee okay so that is a typical eye case set up for a limb and I will quickly do that for the front leg as well the only difference being we have the shoulder blade bone which doesn't need to be part of the eye catching so like this one will make the chain link three so it extends up to this bone and then this one will just be free-floating for us to manipulate and rotate as we need so I will jump forward until that is completed okay so the front leg is now rigged appropriately and we can also move this shoulder blade up we can rotate it however you want so that's looking pretty good what happens now when we rotate the base of the spine we should start to see some intuitive automatic movement that's believably doglike so you can see that my feet are staying where they are but the whole body is moving accordingly oh but look we just broke it so always as a rigger getting the habit of playing with your rig trying to break it to discover where the problems are so the problem here is that our foot bone is being dislocated from the front leg and the simple way we can solve this is adding a copy locations constraint to this foot bone making it copy the location of this bone so I can do this quickly automatically filling in these constraint fields if I select the source bone then shift select the bone that I want to add the constraint to and here in the pose menu go to constraints add with targets and choose location constraint I'm sorry copy location and our foot bone now pops up to the head of our I guess ankle bone we'll call it and I can make it switch to the tail over here in the constraint by sliding it up to be the tail instead and now we don't get any painful dislocations but the functionality is still there this foot is parented to our target but it's copying locations of this bone here okay so that's great we'll have to do the same thing for the back all right select first our source where we want to copy locations from then shift select where we want to copy the locations to and let's add with pose constraints ad with targets or shift control see copy location and switch the position to be the tail instead of the head okay there we go that's one problem solved and we can continue on next will address the ik4 the head now this will be very similar to any limb that we've already done and that will include instead of extruding here I'm going to duplicate this bone in edit mode shift D to duplicate it and we'll call it head underscore I K - target and we'll leave that bone the same size but then select the head bone and let's scale that down again I'm doing this in edit mode not pose mode okay so the same kind of thing we're going to parent our head bone to the eye Kate argot keep offset we're going to clear the parent on this eye k alt P clear parent and then tab to pose mode we're going to add an IKE a constraint to this bone change the target dog rig and then we're looking for a head eye Kate argot it'll make the chain length I think three just like the other ones okay now when we move the eye Kate argot you can see what this functionality will be like however we have the same dislocation problem so we will just do the copy locations constraint and it's there we go shift control C copy location and change it to the tail there we go all that works the same as our legs pretty intuitive control however if I move the hips that might be a desired effect leaving the head stationary but it's also possible that I will want this Ike a target bone to be parented where these shoulders are parented like this so we'll just do that and keep it simple for this particular rig so now the head goes with the rotation of the spine and we can add individual head movement on top of that okay so we've got pretty good movement so far what else are we forgetting the tail oh and before I get to the tail you might have noticed that I did not add a pull target control for or our neck okay and that's because the neck doesn't have a knee we're not trying to aim the point of articulation in the head or rather than neck any particular direction so this should work out fine the way it is without an ike a pull target but that is a difference from our limbs that we've rigged up so i should mention that before moving on to the tail and let's see what should we do about the tail it doesn't need to be a lot of movement let's see I'm going to duplicate this well I need to duplicate it in edit mode leave it where it is and we'll scale this bone up and then move it to kind of approximate the general direction that the tail is pointing I'm gonna call this tail - ctrl for control and I'm actually gonna parent this bone to the base of our spine ctrl P connected oh wait it was already parented so yes this is going to be parented to this bone as it already is since it's a duplicate then we'll take this bone which is our original tailbone and I'm going to parent it to our new ctrl and we don't want connected we want to keep the offset and so now in pose mode what we'll see is when I rotate this control the whole tail goes with it but what I also want to do is some double transforms on this bone here and so there's a couple ways to do that let's first try by copying the rotations of this bone to the rotations of our second tailbone so we'll select our control first shift ctrl select the tail bone that we're going to add the constraint to shift ctrl C and we'll do copy rotation now it lines up exactly where the ctrl bone is at but if we change local space and local space right here above the influence let's see if that gives us what we want again I want double transforms which yes that is what it's doing so we're getting double transforms first we're getting rotations by this bone being a child of this bone which is parented to our control and then we're doubling the rotation value by copying the rotations again from this control and that's why we're getting this sort of wiggling effect and so that should work out well for a tale control and that will work in all directions okay so that's pretty simple and I believe that that is all the control that we need are all the mechanisms that we need to add at least for this simple rig oh there is one more thing that I want to add and that is for this I capo target so it's mainly for an aesthetic or visually helpful mechanism so right now the ika Paul target doesn't really have any visual association with the knee of our leg and this is true for both of these pole targets and whenever I mirror these bones to the other side we're going to have for Ike a pole targets now when it comes to animation we're going to be moving those all over the place and it's gonna be difficult to immediately distinguish which eye Cape whole target is affecting which bone and so to ease the annoyance of that I can create a mechanism here to directly associate it back to this knee and so what that's going to look like in edit mode is I'm going to extrude a bone here and then snap it to the head of our pull target bone and the parenting by default is going to be with this bone and that's fine but really the parenting is not going to be important let's just clear the parent either clear it or parent it to our pole target by keeping the offset there we go what I want to do is make this bone stretch in between our knee and the pole target and so I know I just parented that but actually don't think that's gonna work so let's just clear the parent like I did originally and well to be honest I think it should probably be parented to this like I had it originally albeit disconnected yeah let's just do it that way now the reason for that is I can select this eye cape whole target select the stretch bone which I should rename back leg underscore Ike a stretch or specifically a pull stretch Oh have an equal sign in there there we go and with this particular selection I can go to pose go to the constraints add with targets and choose stretch to okay now wherever I move this I kabe own the I cape old target that other bone will stretch to it so there's always going to be an association between this pull target and the knee that it's controlling so let's do the same thing up here in edit mode e to extrude alt P to disconnect the bone and then we'll snap this to the head of our I cap hole target to snap I'm just hitting G to move and then holding ctrl and that will snap to points on our bone especially if we're using a vertex snapping label you have to be using vertex snapping but that is the default so once that snaps will go to pose mode and do the same selection pull target first then our stretching bone shift ctrl C whoops shift ctrl C and choose stretch to and we'll also rename this bone front leg underscore okay pull stretch it's very important to stay organized this is the simple rig and I've already named a bunch of things uniquely so the more complex or it gets of course you need to be organized to compensate for that alright so that is I believe the last thing that I want to do to this rig we're ready to then mirror it to our other side so I'll save this file updating it to version number four and to mirror the bones from the left side to the right side it's really pretty simple will tab into edit mode on our armature and with B box select let's choose every bone on the left side of our animal and first we need to auto name these bones to have a dot L suffix and we can do that quickly with the armature menu auto name left and right and since these bones are visually on the right side of this green line blender will automatically name those dot L because technically they're on the left side be positive X side of our 3d world and so with that dot L on all of these bone names go back to the armature menu and choose symmetrize and now in pose mode we have all that same functionality for free on the right side so that is excellent we now have a full rig that's ready for the model to be parented to however in order to do that we need to be smart about how we parent note that not all of these bones need to influence the model for example Rik pole targets do not need to have any vertex weights on them but only the initial skeleton that we drew up needs to have vertex weights and so we need to set those original bones to be deformable and then all of our other mechanism bones do not need to be deformable and so by default I believe the bones are set to deform yeah down here in our bone settings you have the deform option that's checked on for every bone by default so this is where organization comes in I'm going to select all the bones that don't need to deform that's going to be the eye k head control well all of our Ike a control bones so that's these box select so I get on the other side as well box select the head box like the tail control box select the eye Cate argit's I think that that's it all of these do not need to deform so over here in the deform settings I'm going to hold the Alt key so it's applied to all my selected bones and deselect deform rather uncheck it so now all of these bones should be off deform okay so let's undo until I get my selection back and I'm going to add those to another bone layer so in our armature menu let's just place those on layer number two I can do that in the viewport hitting m to move bone layers and just select layer two right there awesome so now that that is a little more organized I can have only my controls if I want them or only my deformable bones okay so now when I parent my model to this rig it will only receive influence from our deformable bones let's reveal our dog model and let's see here so we don't have a mirror modifier on this dog rig which is unfortunate because we can get some work for free if we do so let's tab into edit mode on our dog and let's just try to sell out all the vertices on the left side the visual left side here so with box select let's select right up until the horizon and delete those vertices and there we go I think that that's pretty much symmetrical or all the verts on the visual left side and then let's add a mirror modifier place that above the subsurf and there we go just double check to make sure that it looks the same looks good to me the reason I want to do that is the mirror modifier will automatically mirror the bone weights when we parent to the rig and so without the mirror modifier we would have to maintain the vertex weights for both sides of the animal and now we won't have to do that so let's shift select our rig and ctrl tab to go back to object mode so we first selected the model shift select the rig hit ctrl P and choose armature deform with automatic weights and now if we go to pose mode on the rig and go to layer number two where we have our controls let's see how it works all right it's a little bit choppy but we can see our rig is deforming to take care of the choppiness it has to do with the order of our modifier so if we go to our model here look at our modifiers we actually want the armature all the way above I think mirror I think that'll be no that's not right I want it after mirror there we go so now when I move the rig it's much more responsive because the armature is not worrying about the additional geometry from the subsurface modifier instead the subsurface is smoothing after the armature is being calculated so that's why it was clunky before and now it's very responsive and so this rig is in pretty good shape you can see that the tail there that's the kind of effect that I was after more of a wagging kind of behavior so that looks pretty good really it does need some additional weight painting especially down here in the chest you can see how it's just caving in and that doesn't look very good doesn't look match but I'm not going to do that in this lesson you can see how to do that from the course and also I'm not going to show how to set up custom controls but that is a required criteria for this exercise I want to make sure that you know how to do that and so again I covered that in the course but one thing in particular is I did not have this stretching I cabe own as part of the course so I'll show you quickly how to set up a custom shape for that and it's extremely simple so in object mode let's hit shift a to add a mesh plane and then tab into edit mode select all of our vertices hit SX and scale to 0 then for simplicity's sake with everything still selected we'll choose remove doubles so now we just have one line vertex to vertex and I'll call this WGT for widget and stretch ok so now when I select our stretching I kabe owns we can add a custom shape here and choose that widget stretch I need to also enable wireframe and now you can see I don't quite have it correct so actually need to go back to our object and since this is covering two grid units I only need to cover one grid unit so I believe it's this vertex let's snap it to the increment option hit gy control there we go not snap there yeah and now you can see what the stretching iCade us with a custom shape it's always going to point back to the knee that it's influencing so that's pretty cool we can do that for these others as well very cool and so that's it for the instructors notes everything else to accomplish this dog rig has been explained in the course so I hope this has helped I look forward to seeing your submission

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 76,525

Keywords: rigging, character, dog, armature, bones, constraints, IK, FK, quadruped, animal

Id: 0IB5KCPmEEI

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/jovanovic3d]

CGC is good but if you are into serious animation or rigging I would strongly suggest you check up Pierrick Picaut and his free YT and paid tutorials like The Art Of Effective Rigging In Blender. He has this thick french accent but the information is top notch! Take Care!