Rigging a Low Poly Person | Blender 2.8 | Beginners

hello and welcome back to GABA Media I'm grant Abbott and today due to popular demand we are rigging our very low poly character this will be a very basic rigging tutorial and it's a follow on from my previous tutorial about making this low poly block person so I'll go through the very basics of rigging and a tiny bit about animation if you want to learn more about animation then do follow the links in the description and the card in the corner I do also have a video for rigging characters I'll put a link in the description and a card in the corner and that will show you how you can rig characters that aren't in this sort of blocky form but it also shows you how you can use add-ons and quite quickly and easily and use things like motion capture animations that are already pre-made so if you're looking for a quick easy solution then take a look at that video it is 2.79 but comment in the description if you want me to update that one okay so here we are in blender I think we're going to choose the woman to animate because my man is slightly asymmetrical not that it makes a huge amount of difference in this case but it'll just make things a bit quicker so I'll hide my man so what I need to do is add some bones a good place to start is right in the center so I'll shift right-click in the center there and that will move my 3d cursor into the middle shift paid to add and then down to armature and that will make a single bone in the middle there one thing that's very helpful is to go across to the object context menu click on that and go down to viewport display and click in front that way wherever we go we can see our bones I'll go to front for you again with one of my num pad and into edit mode now so I'm into edit mode with tab or I can go to edit mode up here and I can select the different parts of my bone top bottom or the whole bone from in the middle and I can move it around with G rotate and so forth but what I want to do is grab the end and press e to extrude in the z axis I might as well constraint that the z axis event will stay in the middle and move it up to there so I'm creating a bone for each of my objects so move up slightly e to extrude in the Zed axis up to the top there so that's that bone for the torso you could actually do two bones for the torso because it has got a looped out in there so it would Bend and that's something to note you need to have the topology that will actually Bend in order for the bone to work so this bone connected to the middle of the waist here it makes sense only to have one bone if I have let's say four bones and I wanted to bend all over the place it wouldn't because it's only got eight vertices to move around so with the top one selected let's eat extrude that and constrain to the z-axis and move it up for the neck and one for the head he took screwed in the said I'm not going to worry too much about my objects not being in center but you can realign them if you want to so we've got the middle there now let's create an arm so if I shift right click over here that will move my cursor over here and in edit mode if I press shift a now it just adds a bone because that's the only option to add this is pointing up so we can grab the end here G to grab and pull it down and I'm going to pull it to the end of the before I'm here and this Aiko sphere is going to be moved with this four unblocked with one bone so II to extrude down to there now if you want to you could do a couple of bones here maybe a thumb bone as well I'm going to keep it nice and simple and just extrude one out for the hands now we need to get this arm connected to the middle section so don't follow along with this but I'm just going to show you if I go to pose mode now that's how we pose our characters and move this arm so our to rotate you can see that it moves all the ones below it so this one is a child of this one which is the parent and this one is the child of this one which is the parent and a good analogy when thinking about this is that you think of a mother with a baby insider so the mother moves and the baby moves with her but the child can actually move independently of the mother it does get weird of course when you get a baby inside a baby so these are all parented up the line the mother here has a child and a grandchild so I'm going to select those bones and press alt R and that removes any rotation olt is always kind of the undo of a command so old G would undo the movement and alt s undo scale and alt P will actually undo a parent so thinking about that we want to connect this bone to this middle here so when we move this one it moves the arm with it now I've just noticed I've got my rotation around my 3d cursor so I change that back to the meeting point which is the default and it will make more sense when I rotate it inhale so these ones are all children of each other and they say the main parent and it looks like a great grandparent or something of this one here so like I say we want this one to move with this bone here so when I move the torso the arms go with it so I need to go back to edit moment for that too over here to edit mode and you can start following along again and I need to select this bone and then the one you want to parent to last so that becomes the active object so shift select the bone in the middle here and that's highlighted yellow so we know that's the active object if I press ctrl P now for parent you get this menu you can either press connected which will actually move that bone to the other bone or keep offset which is what we want at the moment because we want to keep the distance between them so again don't follow this bit I'll just go to pose mode and show the results of that so if I now move this one it moves the arm with it so this is the child of this parent and this is the child of this parent and now this is the child of this object which is the child of this parent which it's out of this bit hopefully that's all making sense so let's go back to edit mode you can follow along again so now we need a leg down here so I'll move down here and I'll shift right-click so my cursor comes to this point and shift a to add a bone let's grab the top of that bone with G pull it down to the top of the knee joint there e to extrude put it down and one last one e to extrude and pull it down there now obviously I need to go to cyber u so three on my numpad and move these bones around I'll quickly do that it's easiest to constrain to the y axis then you know you're not moving it out of position in the front view okay so we've got a basic armature setup but we need to mirror these to the other side and I need to parent this one so let's do the parenting first so child first then the parents shift select the parent the parent is the active object because it's highlighted yellow ctrl P keep offset so I'll show you what connected looks like it will move your whole object across to the end of that bone and undo that control P keep offset and then you get that faint black line when I go to pose mode now don't follow along with this and grab that object it moves the whole thing so back to edit mode and let's talk about mirroring these across to the other side if I select all of them just by box selecting we can press shift D to duplicate if I press X now I can move it across the other side so you can see my duplication now we can right click and mirror and if I press X global that will mirror in the x-axis let's just press G then X and move it back into place okay so we've got our armature setup now you can test it out in pose mode if you like and just see how it moves and what's a parent and what's a child if you've moved it around select everything and alt are will remove any rotations if you grab the middle one that's the only one you can actually press G to grab and that will move your whole object then you need to press alt G to remove any movement so let's go back to front mode for a moment and we're going to parent our mesh this time to our armature now don't follow along there's a couple of ways of doing this and I'm going to show you the easiest way for no errors but it does take a tiny bit longer the quick way if I go into object mode select everything and just make sure the armature is the active object which it is at the moment because it's highlighted yellow if it isn't you just press shift on it and that will be the last one that you've selected and therefore active then you press control P if you don't get this menu then the armature is probably not being selected last and isn't the active object but you can press with automatic weights so if I press that and then click on my armature and go to pose mode you can see that it's all rigged automatically and the weights are set automatically now there's a problem here where these objects here are somehow attached to this bone over here and that's why in this case it's probably easier to set up your weights in a slightly different way because these are all separate objects it's fairly easy to hook the individual bones up to the individual objects so now I'm back to where I was before I parented the bones ready to do it a different way before I do that it is actually a good idea with everything selected just to press ctrl-a to set or apply your rotation and scale that can sometimes solve any tiny glitches so let's start with the hand down here now I want to be able to select the hand then this bone now if I click on this bone it selects object mode so I'll need to go across the pose mode and then deselect this bone we're doing a control left click box select and then select this bone and now I can press ctrl P bone and then I can rotate this and it just moves that hand which is great so by selecting bone I've only hooked up to that one individual bone now if I want to select this object here I can't actually click on it I can click on my different bones but I can't click on my object I would have to come out of pose mode into object mode select this bone select the armature back into pose mode then select this bone and then control P bone and we see that's working nicely but it's slightly quicker if we turn off under the Edit menu lock object modes this is quite handy so I turn this off I can now select my object then select this bone because it's already in pose mode so it's locking that object mode and it's locking this in its previous mode as it were and now I can select two different objects at the same time I can then press control P and bone and now when I move this bone it's all selected so I'll explain it once more I select my object I want to be the child the bone second with shift and you'll notice that this bone has been selected as well because it was previously selected you will have to press ctrl and box select to get rid of that one you can do to coerce press alt' a to deselect everything then read select the one you want I just find it easy with control box select control is to deselect something and I want to parent these two together so ctrl P and bone that way when I move this bone that all moves with it and I should have select this one as well that would have been easier this one in this one control P bone now you can do two objects at once so let's do the other side this object and this object are both on this bone so I can select this bone last get rid of that bone with ctrl left click box select control P bone let's check that's working and that's working fine so you need to go through your object connecting up the bones like that then lastly put it into a weird position to make sure it's working which mine seems to be okay but from the arms inserted into the leg and then if you want to reset your position just select all your bones with a and then alt R and if you've moved the center bone which is G to grab then you'll need to press alt G now a very quick note about animation are very briefly run through it for you we have our timeline down the bottom here let's move my playhead by clicking and dragging it so it's at frame 1 and let's move our character into some weird position remember to have your armature selected and make sure you're in pose mode ok so we've got this strange position here if I select all my bones now and press I for insert keyframe and then select location and rotation now I could just select rotation because I've only rotated the bones but if you've got that middle bone selected and you've moved it somewhere then you need location and rotation so I location and rotation and that sits this tiny diamond object there and that means there's a keyframe set now let's go along to let's say 50 frames and move our character around again select all your bones and then press hi to insert the keyframe so location and rotation now when I drag between these two frames you can see they animate so the computer works out where the bones need to be moving to go from one to the other keyframes I can copy these keyframes so if I select one and press the shift D and move it to a frame 100 I then get a sort of looping animation where they're doing something really odd okay so that's a really basic approach to rigging and animation just to give you an idea so you can have a bit of fun and a bit of a play do you remember that you have got your lock object modes set so you will be able to select different objects and in pose mode so don't move your body just move your rig so I hope that helps you all do comment below if you want anything extra there's only so far I'm going to go with this course I'll probably do some more in-depth character tutorials in later series so thanks for watching and I hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 361,612

Rating: 4.972403 out of 5

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, guide, easy, rigging, rigging characters, rigging in blender 2.8, bones, armatures, weight painting, blender 2.8, how to, low poly, blender rigging tutorial, character modeling, blender tutorial, 3d modeling

Id: srpOeu9UUBU

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019