Rigging and animating tails, whip and chains in blender the easy way

[Music] and meeting tails whips or chain can be a real pain in this video I will show you how to adapt your rig and all to animate those with ease we've sent a animation involved a lot of rotation with a lot of follow-through animation but we can also improve this kind of animation by playing with the different location values but if you want a good deformation you will have to add a lot of dune and so the animation process can become very painful and it can be also very hard to guess all to animate in this video I will show you some tip to really make this with ease let's get started since my cut is not really willing to up by providing me his tail I have to burn some kind of tail match let's say so I've just added a 12 vertices circle and extruded it vertically and then language subdivided yeah I used to have enough geometry so that can be found properly so I just added the first poem that we will be using to create our armature in the object viewport display option I always select in front so that I can see the bone and I generally set the display mode to wireframe instead of texture I've made a short tail so that we won't have to add tons of bone to deform it properly and so the rig will be easier to be explained so to keep it as simple as possible I will only extrude the four bands and they will all up the same length so I can press shift all to repeat the extrude when working on longer chains it can be a good idea to shorten the bones the closer you get to the tip so that the tip will curl more than the basis of the tail or whatever you are ringing with this first bone created I'd like to display the length in the axe I feel like it's better when I'm reading to up those information for organization sake from there I will name them with the prefix death for deformation and give them a number I will then directly bind the mesh to the armature by pressing ctrl P and choosing with automatic weight and then I will do a pass of weight painting to fix the deformation issues in this case I will create a blending of the weight painting so that the tail will be curving whenever its deformity I won't get out angles with the bending unless it's out surface I always pose what I'm white painting first so that I have the deformation and I can see the behavior when I'm waiting let's dive into the actual rig as you may know if you have taken my rigging calls the art of effective rigging I never walk directly onto the deformation chain so that if I make any mistake I won't be destroying the current deformation armature so I always duplicate the deformation bones and call them target bones and those target bone will add a copy transform constraint on to the deformation chain this will allow us to eventually disconnect the deformation bone or even destroy the parenting without modifying their behavior I've explained one of the major benefit of this method into this video so from there whenever I will move those bone the deformation bone will follow because I have a copy transform constraint now I want to create my controller chain so I will duplicate the target bone chain and parent them by choosing disconnect and to make them easier to find I will scale them down using individual origin I will rename those bones with the prefix ctrl for control using the batch rename now the idea is to make the target chain to follow the movement of this chain so what I will do is that parent each bone of the target chain through the corresponding controller or the overlapping controller if you will so from there the ring is kind of done because whenever you rotate those bone the other will follow and that's what we want but if you were to translate those bone then you will have weird deformation because the produced bone in the chain is no longer rotating toward the next one to fix that we just need to add a dampened track constraint from the next controller onto the previous target bone so we can do this on the world chain and what I did is that I've created a last controller twig bone on the very end of the chain so that I can also reorient the last target bone using this newly created bone now if I rotate controller the target bone will rotate and if I move to controller the produced target bone will track it from there our rig is done and ready for animation I will now show you a little improvement that can be very useful on characters for example one unwanted behavior that can be a bit hard to spot on a cylinder shape is the twisting issue this is something we tend to fix on wrists or Apes for example but we can also use the same mechanism on this Tegra do so we will tell the previous target bone to follow the twisting rotation of the next control bone with a fall-off to do so I will just select the control bone then the previous target bone and add a copy rotation as we could expect the bone will follow the rotation of the control bone so it gets the same orientation and this is not what we want but since we have a dumptruck constraint that although us to target the target bone to one of the next controller if we put the copy rotation first then the damping track constraint will occur and retarget the bone so we have first the copy rotation that give the twist motion and then the dump truck constraint that will reorient the bone toward the controller just repeat the process on the whole chain alright time for the magical trick we will create our first animation so I will do an animation from frame 0 to frame 60 and set my frame rate to 30 fps I'd like to animate with this frame rate then I will insert a keyframe for everyone and I will only add a left-to-right motion onto the root ball so the idea of this method is that you will only be animating at first the very root of the tail of the whip of the chain or whatever you are animating and then we will procedurally create the next Bond animation that we will be able to refine later on now what we need to create is an empty per bone in the chain but the number 1 so we will create in this case only free empties because we will be playing on the rotation first for each MT we will add a copy rotation constraint and the source will be each controller bone with my first empty created I will just duplicate it and change the source of the constraint then we can move them aside since they are only copying the rotation we can still play with the allocation so now we can see our different empties following the rotation of the corresponding bone what I want to do now is to get rid of the constraint and keep the animation so I will bake the animation selecting those free bones press f3 and search for bake which we can find in the NLA edit or I will use visual King and clear constraint and press ok now they have lost they are constrained but they are still rotating because now they have their own animation the idea now is to use those empties to constraint the bone so we are reversing the constraint in way first I will isolate the Euler rotation by opening the filter and tapping Euler's so that I only see the Euler I will select those free and T's and I will press shift e make cycles so that now those animation will cycle infinitely now I will reverse the constraint by constraining the bone with those empty adding copy rotation this is one of the method I've learned in the animation shop at most by rich article about space switching owns all my constraints are done we can see that the EMTs are aligned with the Bulls but since there were copying the rotation of those bones it's exactly the same but as soon as I will offset the animation of those empty on the x-axis in the timeline we will see a slight delay of follow-through animation on our tail you can then play with the offset of those curve or even amplify them to get a broader movement for example and you don't you have reversed this mechanism you just need to bake those animation onto your bones so you just have to select the bones as we did with the EMTs press f3 search for the bake option and this time I will also check the override current action so that those will be baked directly upon the current animation and it will create the new action for the armature I can get rid of the empties and my animation is done so this is a great start for a tail animation for example in this case we have only used the rotation let's see what we can do by using all transform channel and the location since I want to make some kind of whip animation I will create some kind of anticipation and then I will make a very fast movement in the other direction until our kind of tail at the ground from there as before I will create an empty for each bone and I will create a fourth and D for the fourth ball instead of the copy rotation constraint this time I will use copy transform constraint for each of those empties and make the animation from there the different empty will be snapped to the different bone because they are both copying the rotation as previously but also the location and they will follow the movement of the bone in space I will now add a copy transform constraint to each bone targeting each corresponding entities from there whenever I'm moving an empty the bone will fall and so the tail will be deformed now as we previously did with the rotation animation I will offset each of the empties animation in time selecting all of them offsetting them by one frame then selecting the next one and upsetting it by one additional frame here you can see the difference of behavior compared with the rotation workflow one of the great thing here is to be able to then tweak the animation using those empties it's way easier to understand their behavior in the world space than playing with the bone location in their local space and if for example I don't want my tail to go through the ground or whatever surface I just need to set a limit on this position so here for example I want to make those empties contacting the ground but if I don't push their curve beyond this limit they will never clip with the ground so the idea is not to fully automate the workflow but at least to really help you getting a base animation to work on so you may think that I'm wasting a lot of time by setting up all those empties and all those constraints and you are right thankfully my friend Finn I started developing a new atom called the space switcher that will allow us to make all of this automatically and also include other features that are awesome if you have seen some of my latest animation video you've seen that I rely a lot on this atom because it's such a time-saver space switching has become a full part of my animation pipeline and it allows me to tweak animations with ease Finn has been developing this add-on for more than four months and I've been testing it all along so the beta version will be soon release it allows you to automatically constraint multiple bones at once you can choose whatever channel you want to constraint the number of frame you want to offset the animation per bone and you also have the possibility to amplify the effect of the constraint which is something you can't do unless you go deep into curve editing it will also bake the animation on the empties for you but also onto the bone so basically you don't need to jump back and forth into pose mode onto your empties into the NLA baking tools etc speed switching and this add-on allow me to do a lot of stuffs like animating equipment or changing a relationship behavior into a rig on the fly this is a major improvement in my workflow so I will try to share as much as I can in my animation breakdown that are coming in the meantime thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye

Channel: Pierrick Picaut

Views: 63,157

Keywords: blender3D, modeling, shading, rigging, B3D, p2design, sculpting, digital, animation, cartooning, rendering, CYCLES, tutorial, Pierrick, Picaut, Pieriko, 3D, Computer, Graphic, blender, eevee, VIDEO GAME

Id: Xy6DHSEl5Cs

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020