Rigging for beginners - Blender tutorial

if you watch the last video then you have these characters politely standing still and you probably want to make them move around and stuff so we're going to do some rigging to make that happen I'll cover making an Armature setting up ik constraints some other constraint stuff weight painting tips and plenty of other little things sprinkled in there if you didn't watch the last video then uh you're fired this video should still help give you a basic understanding of how to put bones in a model to make it move around whether it's a character or not I will be going step by step in this one so if you want a quick survey on a lot of rigging Concepts then check this video out I will have some new secret tips though so it might be worth sticking around first let's address the elephants in the room yes there are rigging add-ons that promise to speed things up for you but here's the thing you have to learn how to use those still and if something breaks or if you want to make something that isn't human- shaped you still need to know at least a little about rigging this low poly model we made is human-shaped though so let's use rifi for this and for the next character we'll make it completely custom built to use rifi go to edit preferences add-ons and search for rigify enable it and now when we press shift a we have these new Armature options let's use the basic human meta rig now we just need to line these bones up with our model and to see them a little easier we can go down here to object data properties when it's selected under viewport display you can turn on in front and then we can see them a little better I'll press one to look from the front and with this still selected s to scale we're still in object mode for this I'm going to line up the hip area and I'll press s and X to to scale it out until the knees are kind of uh in the middle of the leg right there and then when we're done scaling we can press crl a and apply the scale now I want to be able to see our vertices a little better too so up here in overlays we can turn on wire frame like that now we can tab into edit mode and we can start lining these up so I like to scale up the whole torso area first so to make that easier we can uh click this button to turn this to active element this is going to change your pivot point you can also do that with uh the period shortcut and so I'm going to select all of the Torso bones and let's select these two bones down here so the way active element works is the last bone that you have selected or you know the active selection that's the one that everything is going to uh pivot around so I selected the hips last and now when we scale up everything is scaling from the hips so I'm just going to line up the headbone the bottom of it is lined up with the bottom of the head we can change the pivot point now back to median and drag this to the top of the head and it's nice only have to do one side you can see if I move this with G the other side isn't moving so we can turn on symmetry up here so let's just uh select this part press a g to line it up with the middle of the arm this one is going to the Elbow this part we can put at the wrist and this part at the tip of the fingers right there let's press seven to look from above and we can line this up over here also so that's just going to be the middle of the hand the wrist area the elbow like that and the middle of the shoulder um it's nice to have a very slight Bend in the direction you know that you want the arm to bend like that if you set it up going the opposite direction it might give you bad results when you start posing things can also line the collar bone up just like that now we should look from the side and make sure that everything is lined up like you know the spine and all that so this I'll put in the center of the head this is just going to be for the neck and if any of these bones are getting in the way and you want to just hide them temporarily you can you know select them and press h to hide them like that so if we want we can hide all of these when you want to bring them back you can just press alt H but this will make it a little easier to you know line the spine up like that we should line up this part with the knee and now the foot this one I'll drag to this uh this Loop cut in the middle drag this out to the front and this bone that it gives you right here that's for the foot roll so basically we just want to line this up with you know the edge of the foot so we can bring everything back with alt H like that and tab back into object mode now this is the topology that we had in the last video and this should be enough to make it deform and it's pretty easy to just you know have a few Loop Cuts but if you want to make this deform even better there are some things that you can do and I'll show you that really quickly so make sure you're in Edge select for this we can select this loop with alt and left click and we can dissolve it with crl X now we can go into face select up here I'm going to select these three faces like that and we're going to press I to inset all right and we can look from the top alt Z to go into x-ray mode and I'll select these vertices right here and press GG to slide them to about halfway right there the way I like to think about this is by looking at my own elbow you can see that clearly on your elbow you have more skin than on the opposite side of your arm and so we're kind of doing the same thing right here where you have more vertices on the elbow than you do on the inside of the arm and this leads to slightly better deformation especially with a model as low poly as this now we could also add a loop here just to make it deform a little more cleanly we can do the same thing with the hips if we want and we can do the same thing with the knee as we did with the elbow so I'll just select this again with alt and left click crl X to dissolve it and then the knee we have more skin on you know our kneecap than we do on the back of our leg so we're going to select the front and press I to ins set then we can look from the side go into x-ray mode select these points and press GG to move it about halfway and that's pretty much it the foot we can leave like that I just wanted to show you that really quickly people do have other ideas of better shoulder topology and you know how everything is supposed to line up so if you're interested in that you can look up some uh pictures on Pinterest and things like that I usually like to search references there okay let's unhide our rig we can select it and then if we go back to object data properties and scroll scroll down we'll have this rigify option that the add-on gave to us and now that everything is lined up we can just press generate rig and now we have this second Armature that it gave us with all these new controls and you can see over here we have meta rig which is the one that we just used and we have the rig right here which is the one that it just gave us we can hide the meta rig now all we have to do is Select our model shift select the Armature contrl p and parent with automatic weights now we can give this a try by pressing tab to go into pose mode or you can change that up here and we can start moving things around so I'll just select the hand and press G to move it and you can see that it's deforming nicely you can also press n to open up this side panel and under this item tab at the bottom we have all of these rig layers that it also gives us but yeah this is rigify it's pretty easy to use for human models like this um you know play around with all of the different controls and you know see what they do and if you want to get started with animating real fast you can check out my character animation for impatient people video and by the way if these weights don't look good for you and you need to weight paint the bones that you're looking for are under bone collections you can go down to O RG right here these are the original bones and these are the ones that actually deform the mesh you can just press the star to only view those and these are the bones that you need to weight paint but I'll talk more about weight painting with the next character all right cool let's throw this character in the trash and get to the good stuff we we got bees with the cat right here and he desperately needs a skeleton but first let's fix up the topology so first thing I'm going to do is come up here and turn on wireframe so we can actually see the real verts and before I start editing this directly I'm going to make a duplicate of this collection in case we mess something up we have something to go back to so you can rightclick it and go to duplicate collection and I'll hide the duplicate right here now I want to add some more Loop cuts to this shirt right here so that it deforms a little better and we should also pay attention to the Topol of the arm underneath right here you can see it has quite a few Loop Cuts compared to our coat right here which doesn't have that many and these should match up pretty closely otherwise when the arm bends the arm might poke through the clothes contrl R to add Loop cuts and we can use the scroll wheel to add three the shape changing as you add Loops is just a thing that happens when you use the subd modifier and if you want to be able to add Loop Cuts without changing the shape too much you can check out the final topology add-on it's the only add-on I've seen that actually tries to make this workflow easier it's not free but I think it's worth the money if you use it as much as I do in this case though we can just adjust things manually since the shape isn't changing that much so I'll select this loop on the edge right here and we can press alt s to use the shrink and fatten tool to bring it in a little like that just to round the edges off if you want this to match closer you can always turn the other collection on and off to you know compare it we can also add another loop cut right here and again I'll use alt and left click right here and ALT s to round this out a little bit and I'll tab back into object mode I think this is good for the coat instead of adding Loop Cuts you could always apply the subdivision surface modifier over here but I think low poly models are much easier to weight paint so I just like to add a few Loops where I need them let's hide the coat with h and we can try to add a few Loop cuts on the legs right here so contrl R use the scroll wheel to add maybe about three like that and ALT s to round that out a little bit tab back into object mode I'll press alt h to unhide the coat and I'm going to add a loop cut on the shoes right here crlr just so we have an extra Loop to help our foot Bend right there I think the last thing I want to do is move the mouth to the middle now you don't really have to do this but I think it's going to make it much easier to rig and plus we can take advantage of some of the Symmetry options when it's actually in the center so let's select this and in the nide panel right here we can reset the location to zero I'm just going to reset the rotation Al together with alt r and then rotate it on the X by 90° and let's just bring it to the front like that I'll tab into edit mode and I'm just going to select these vertices right here and delete them like that and then we can add a mirror modifier so I'll just search for mirror and make sure that it's at the very top I'm also going to add one more Loop cut right here with crlr and I'll just scale these ones on the end down a little bit all right let's move this down all right now we can start adding Bon bones so I'm going to press shift a you can go to Armature and just add a single bone right here now to see this through the model we can go to object data properties the little running person and you'll only see this if you have the Armature selected so you can click that go down to viewport display and turn on in front I'm also going to turn on names and axes this might look a bit cluttered right now but we can always shut this off later so let's look from the front tab into edit mode and we can start lining things up so this is going to be for our hip and I'm actually going to switch over to solid View and x-ray with alt Z and we can line this up right around here with the bottom of the body which is this sphere on the inside and I'll put this at the top of the sphere we can e to extrude then press Z and bring it up to about the bottom of the head this is going to be for the neck and if you want to have more control in the shape of the back you can subdivide this just right click and subdivide once let's select the top part of this bone right here e to extrude Z and bring it to the top of the head now we can rename some of these as we're going so we can select it and press f2 and I'll name this hips this can be spine neck and head this is going to help you stay organized as you go let's do the arms so we can actually just select this joint right here e to extrude and bring it down right about there this is like our shoulder so I'm just going to name it shoulder and I actually don't want this to influence the mesh once it rigs up this is just going to help us control the arm so if you don't want something to actually deform the mesh go down to Bone properties right here and you can uncheck deform and this just makes it so that when you do automatic weights it just doesn't give it any weight at all now from here we can extrude this on the x axis like that maybe up to the wrist you to extrude X to add an elbow I'll select this right click and subdivide now I'll press seven to look from the top and we can set the hand up so e and x and I'm just going to select this and shift d to duplicate and I want this to be parented to the handbone so we can select this shift select the handbone contrl p and keep offset that just means it's parented to this so that when we go into pose mode I can move it and this moves Also let's go back into edit mode though and I just want this to be in the center of the finger and I'll try to line it up with this line right here can shift d to duplicate and we'll just do that for each finger and one for the thumb and I'll just go through and make sure that these are actually lined up up with the loop cuts on the finger it'll just take a second and luckily our hand is flat so we don't really have to worry about positioning too much on the other axes but we can you know check it out like this and if it doesn't look good to you then you can adjust it slightly if you're trying to rig a hand that isn't flat it's probably going to help you a lot to use some of these snapping options so I like to set this to volume right here and then when you move a bone with G you can hold control and it will try to snap it to the middle of whatever object you have selected and this is going to help us a lot when I rig the hair which is completely optional but it's a good way to use that function now I'm going to name some of these bones so for the arms you could do arm one and arm two I like to do bicep and forearm and again you can press f2 to rename or if you have bone properties open you can just rename it up here I'll name this hand and for the fingers it'll be quicker to use the bulk renaming option so I'll just select all of them right here here I'll shift select one so that it's the active selection and you can press contrl f2 this opens up batch renaming and you can change this to Bones I want to set the name and I want to replace it so I'll choose new and I'll just call this finger and that should rename all of them and then these two I'll name thumb with crl F2 okay I'm only going to do one side because we can just copy everything to the other side when we're done so next I'm going to do the leg I'll press alt Z to go into x-ray mode I'll select the spine bone shift d to duplicate and this should already be parented to the hips so we don't have to reparent it or anything now I'll rotate this 180° and just line it up and you can just change the roll right here I'm going to move this until the Z is pointing at us and the x is pointing to the side so it looks like the Z is pointing away from us right now and it seems like this should be - 180 that looks good and let's bring this down maybe a little bit right about here and it's a good idea for the arms and the leg legs to put a very slight Bend in the bones right there and that'll help us when we set up ik constraints so I'll go back and actually do that for the elbow too the arms are going to be moving this way like that push it this way very slightly you don't have to do it a lot just so it's not completely straight now I'll press three to look from the side and we'll do the foot select this e to extrude and I'll bring this down right here you can see when we move it it's changing the tail location over here so we can just reset the Z to zero and it should snap the tail to zero it's e and Y can put it right about here and I'm actually going to duplicate this and move it back right here and this is going to be for the heel but this is just going to be a controller bone for later so we don't want this to deform and remember if you don't want it to deform anything you have to go to Bone properties with it selected and uncheck deform if you want to make sure a bunch of things are not deforming you can just hold alt as you press this and it will work for all the things you have selected let's rename some of these bones again you could do leg one leg two or something like that but I like to do thigh and calf another thing that's important is the bone roll so the way that I like to do it so I'll go into pose mode I like it when the x is pointing in like the most commonly used Direction and what I mean by that is if you're in pose mode you can select a bone press R and then X twice that will rotate it on the local axis and you can see the leg is rotating like this which is what I want you know a leg I think is going to rotate rotate like this most often we can do the same thing for the knee like that and that works right you know you wouldn't really expect it to move like that your leg would be broken some people like to rotate it on the Z instead of the X so you can do whatever you're most comfortable with But whichever one you choose make sure that it's consistent across your entire model and this will just make posing a lot easier down the road so let's go through and check things for the heel it makes sense that it's rotated that way the foot makes sense like that I think the hips and the spine and the neck and the head are all rotating in the right direction I think for the arms that's okay and for the hands I would like for it to be going up and down like that and it looks like all the fingers I want them to be curling up and down too so that we can easily make a fist so what we can do is just select all of them make sure one of them is the active selection and then in edit mode you can change the roll while holding alt and you can see that it rotates all of them at the same time so I think what we need to do is just reset all of these to zero so we can type in zero and hold alt while you press enter and that will change all of them at the same time now just to show you the power of making sure the roll is actually correct let's go back into pose mode Let's just select all the fingers right here and when you change the Pivot Point up here to individual origins or you can press period to change it to that and now each one is rotating individually and this is going to make it really easy to make fists and I'll just change this back to median Point all right let's go go back into edit mode now look from the front and if you just want a simple rig with not a whole lot of detail this amount of Bones will actually work for you I'm going to add a few more later on but let me just show you how to finalize it right now so let's select everything that's not in the middle and we'll select the shoulder too right click and under names choose auton name left and right and that's going to make it so that everything on the left side has a dotl at the end and this is really important if you want symmetrical poses or if you want to flip them from one side to the other now with all of these still selected you can rightclick and choose symmetrize and that's just going to copy everything to the other side and if it had a l it will now have a r at the end now let's go into object mode with control tab select everything make sure that the Armature is selected last contrl p and parent with automatic weights now I'll turn the names and axes off temporarily and if we select the Armature and press control tab to go into pose mode we should be able to move everything around now so if this works for you and all you want is a very simple rig then this might be enough you can see we have some weird deformation right here so I'm going to talk about how to fix that with some extra bones a little weight painting and things like that we're also going to add some bones to the face and we're going to set up ik constraints and just to explain the difference between ik and FK FK is how things move by default you start with parent bones and then you move to the children bones to pose everything with ik you can make child bones control parent bones if you want you can actually go up here to pose options and turn on auto ik and you can see when I move the foot it is kind of doing that but this is kind of a hack and when you actually animate things it's not going to move in the same exact way but Auto ik can be helpful sometimes if you just have a really simple rig and you want to pose it let's turn this off though I'll select all the bones with a alt G alt R and ALT s to reset the location rotation and scale and we can go back into object mode before adding bones to the face I also want to talk briefly about bone collections so you can see if you go to object data properties there is a section called bone Collections and this is a way for you to organize all your bones so if we go into edit mode right here you could for example put the arms into their own collection so I'll just select all of the arms come over here and press the plus button and then click assign we can double click this and just name it arms notice that this has a little circle and this one does also that means that these bones are part of both of these Collections and if you wanted to remove them from a collection then you just select that collection with the bone selected and then click remove and you'll see that that Circle goes away but I'm going to leave it in this collection so I'll just press contrl Z if you're using 4.1 like I am then you can also Nest collections you can just drag and drop them and you can see this little tool tip like that that lets you drop it in the eye will hide the bones in that collection and the star will solo it like this so we can do the same thing for the legs too so I'll just select all of the leg bones right now make a new collection name it legs and then we can assign it like like that if you want you can get really specific with this and have different collections for the left side and the right side different collections for only the hands later on we'll probably put all of the ik controls in their own collection all right let's make some face bones now so I'll look from the front let's select this bone shift d to duplicate and I do have my snapping set to volume so I'll just select the head of this bone right here G and then I'll hold control to snap it to the eyebrow right there can select the other end and snap it as well and then I'll hide this bone so we can see a little better let's check this from another angle and it does look like it is inside pretty nicely let's make sure that axes and names are turned on and again I want to rotate this so that it's going to rotate in the X Direction like the most often so we can change the roll like this until the x is pointing at us and as usual you can go into pose mode to test this out so r x twice and that's how it will be rotating most often let's go back into edit mode and duplicate this put it in front of the now I'll just take this part right here and I'll drag it forward a little bit press s to scale X and zero that will flatten it on the X Direction we'll do the same thing for the Z so sz0 and now this should be straightforward and we can just line this up like so the role for this one is not as important so I'll just reset it to zero let's look from the side and maybe go into x-ray mode and try to line this up so that it's kind of on the surface of this part of the eye right here and later on we'll add some con straints to make this easy to control I'll also turn the length down I'm just going to hold shift while I do this so it moves a little more slowly again I'll duplicate the eyebrow right there bring it down to the mouth let's select the head right here and we can set the X to Zero so it's dead center and then we can just line it up and then line it up in this direction I'll set the roll to zero so the x is pointing at us and then I'll subdivide this it'll be pretty convenient to have a control bone that lets me move all of the mouth bones at the same time so I'll just select the center one right here e to extrude Y and I'll just pull it out like that now because of the direction of these this one should already be disconnected but if it's not you can press alt p and disconnect bone and if it is connected then these bones are probably facing the other direction and you can just select them right click and we have a switch Direction option right here this one is just going to control things so we don't need it to deform anything so we can select it come down to this bone Tab and then uncheck to form all right let's add some bones to the hair now and I think this will be easiest if we go back into object mode and we can select all of the pieces of hair and then the Armature and then press slash and we can isolate all of those let's go back into edit mode select this bone right here shift d to duplicate and we can start lining it up with G and hold control to make it snap like that so G and control you can duplicate it and then hide this one right here we can select this G and now we because these are overlapping it's possible that this won't actually snap to the center so if you don't want to line it up like this and you do want to use snapping then you can just go back into object mode and you can hide this one also and then go back into edit mode and you know it'll be a little easier for you let's duplicate this do the last piece of hair let's hide this back in object mode I'll hide this also and then we can line this up a little easier all right let's unhide everything back in object mode with alt H so I'll select all of these alt while I change the roll and I want the X to be kind of pointing at us like this then we can right click and subdivide and instead of lining this up just by I we can change the transformation orientation to normal like this and this will make it a little easier to just push them up like that just make sure to set it back to Global when you're done now we can go back into object mode press slash again to unhide everything so with all of these pieces selected I can press crl f2 make sure this is set to bones we want to set the name and we want to give them new names and I'll just call them hair this is going to be eyebrow I mouth one Mouth 2 and this one I'll call control mouth now I want everything to move with the headbone so we just need to make sure that everything is parented up so we can select all of these shift select the head last contrl p and keep offset same thing with the eyebrow and the eye and for the mouth I want to make sure that this bone right here is parented to the control bone so keep offset and then the control bone we can parir to the Head now for the eyebrow the eye and these two mouth bones let's just select all of them rightclick names Auto name left and right so all of them should have a DOL now and then we can right click and symmetrize to flip them to the other side now if you want to do more than this you totally can you could do the ears the whiskers the nose whatever you want but this is where I'm going to stop we could also add all of these to their own collection so I'll make a new one called face and I'll make sure that it's inside this collection and I'll just select all of the bones that we just made and all the hair and assign it like that next let's add a few bones to the coat right here just so that we have extra control for if you know the coat is overlapping with the legs things like that we can control it separately so I'll go back into object mode select this right here and we can turn off the subdivision surface modifier like that so that we can see the actual verts and this will help us line things up a little better now let's select the Armature go into edit mode I'll just duplicate the thigh right here and then I'll press shift H to hide everything else let's go up to the snapping options and turn on vertex snap right here so we'll press G and hold control we can snap it right there G and control so G and control and we'll change the roll afterward all right let's select this one in the front and what I'm going to do is make sure that the Z is pointing outward like that so this one I'll just reset set to - 180 so that it's you know precise and the other ones I'll just kind of do by I that seems good this one I'll rotate like that right about there and then this one is probably going to be zero yep now I'll just select all of these contrl F2 and we can rename it something like coat or clothing or something like that the ones that aren't in the center we can select those rightclick Auto name left and right and then we can right click again and symmetrize those now if you really wanted to you could make it so instead of flaring out kind of like an umbrella that they all kind of move in One Direction or the other but this is the way that I'm doing things with these still selected we can add these to their own bone collection I'll click the plus and I'll name it clothing and a sign all right next let's set up the ik for the leg bones so just to make this a little easier to see I'm going to go into edit mode I'm just going to hide all of the bones on the right side just so we don't accidentally select them when we're looking from the side like this now I'll go into x-ray mode with alt Z and I'll select this foot bone right here shift d to duplicate and then right click to snap it back into place now I'm doing this to keep the same orientation right here but to make it easier to see we can change the length over here like that I'll just make it a little smaller and I'll name it ik. leg DOL and this isn't going to be deforming anything so make sure that deform is unchecked also make sure this isn't parented to any of the leg bones so you can press Alt alt p and clear parent if it is parented to any of the leg bones you'll get this issue where the leg will just start spinning around like crazy and that's because of a dependency Loop where two bones are looking at each other and trying to follow each other's movement now to set up the ik constraint we have to go into pose mode and we have this situation now where there's one bone inside of another and it can be kind of annoying to select but if you hover over two bones and you press alt and then left click it will give you this option to select one of them so we can just select the ik bone now and then shift select this calf bone right here there are a few ways to add the I constraint you can do the First with shift I that's one way you can do control shift C and that will just give you this constraint menu or you can go down to Bone constraints right here there are two of them one is constraints one is specifically for bones so make sure you're on the bone one and you can choose inverse kinematics right here but I'm going to do shift I like that and now if we select the ik bone right here here you can see that it is acting a little differently but it's trying to move the entire body so what we can do is again select this yellow bone right here and change the chain length to two if you have it set to zero it's going to try to control as much as it possibly can we know the chain length should be two because we just want to control this bone and this bone right here just to see a little better I'm going to turn the names and axes off for now I'm going to set the foot up in a pretty simple way but if you want something a little more advanced with like toe pivoting and stuff like that then you can can check out this tutorial that I already made about making a foot rig go into edit mode select the ik bone right here and if you have names off you can still see the names up here of the one that you have selected so I know this is ik. L.L anyway select that then shift select the heel contrl P keep offset and if we select the hips and move the hips down you can see that the leg is kind of staying in place but I don't like how the foot is rotating so we can make it so that this foot bone always matches the rotation of this ik bone right here so select the ik bone shift select the foot bone control shift C remember this is the shortcut for adding constraints and then we can choose copy rotation and the last bone you select that's the bone that always gets the constraint added to it and if you want to tweak any of these settings just open up bone constraints with that bone selected you can see that it's copying it in World space once we fix the weight painting we can actually have some decent heel pivoting we also have this other issue where the Knee will flip backwards if we move it to certain parts so to prevent this we can set up a Target bone let's go back into edit mode and right here select the knee e to extrude Y and we can just bring this out like that I'll press alt P to clear the parent and we can just bring this out right here and we can name it target. leg DOL and for easier control I like to parent this to the heel so contrl P keep offset now back in pose mode you can see we have this section for a pole Target we just need to select the Armature and then the bone we just named it Target so I can just search for Target like that and now this is flipping sideways so we can just change the pole angle right here it should be 90 like that you just want it to be pointing in this direction now let's give it a test and you can see that it's working properly and if we rotate the leg from the heel because this is parented to the heel it should rotate properly like that too I'll reset the pose with alt G and ALT R and so we don't have to set this up on the other side what we can do is go into edit mode alt H to unhide the bones on this side and I'm actually just going to delete all of these leg bones over here with X and we can select all of the leg bones on this side right click and symmetrize so this should work fine now for both sides let's add these bones to a new collection so we can press the plus I'll call this ik let's select all of the bones that we're using for the ik so I'm just going to hide a few of these bones to make it easier to select I'll s the heels this bone right here and the target let's remove it from this and from the legs and assign it to the ik right there honestly we don't even really need to see these so if you want you can just make another one that's just called like mechanism or something like that and sometimes I do this for bones that you don't really need to see but you need to have them to make things work so I'll just select these assign it and then remove it from the other one and then we can just hide it after afterward so we don't need to see those all right let's turn the other bone collection back on alt H so we can see those let's do this for the arms now too so in edit mode I'll just again delete everything on this side I'll duplicate the hand right here shrink the length very slightly and I'll rename it ik. arm. l alt P to unparent it back in pose mode with that still selected we can shift select this bone right here shift I and add to active bone let's make sure that's selected go over to Bone constraints set the chain length to two because again we only have these two if you want you can set it to three and it will control the bone right here but I'm going to leave it set to two and I do like how the elbow is pointing this way but we should also add a pole Target for this too so I'll press alt G to reset the location back in edit mode we can just extrude from the elbow right here e and then y select that alt P clear the parent and I'll just pull this out very slightly now back in pose mode we can select this yellow bone right here under pole Target select the Armature and then the bone we forgot to name so come back over here F2 target. arm. L and then we can add that bone here by searching for Target and again it might rotate weird so we just have to rotate it until it's pointing the right way and we can use this to change the rotation of the arm like that so let's just select everything over here right click and symmetrize if we wanted to move our whole character around we'd kind of have to do that in object mode like this but sometimes it's nice to be able to do that from pose mode and to do that we need a bone that's higher than the hips that we can parent some of the unparented bones to and people usually call that the root bone so you can add one of those in edit mode with shift a I'll just look from the side select the tail of the bone RX and 90 and I'll just reset the roll right here and change the length to something a little smaller like maybe .5 and with that selected press f2 and name that root now we have a few bones that are just not parented to anything so we could parent the hips to this bone contrl P now we get to decide if we want to parent these ik arm bones to the hips or to the root bone basically if we parent it to the hips when we move the hips down the arms will follow sometimes I'll even add an extra bone just for controlling the entire torso so that you kind of have the option to do either you know what let's let's do that really quickly in edit mode I'll just shift d to duplicate the hips and I'll turn the length up so it's bigger and I'll call this control. torso we can select the hips parent it to that big bone right there with keep offset and then the Torso bone just make sure that is parented to the root Also let's select all of these arm ik bones right here and if you want to shift select a bone that's nested within a bone you can hold alt and shift like that and it'll keep the previous selection now we can select the Torso bone contrl p and keep offset now we can test it out back in pose mode so now if we want we can you know move the hips like this and the hands will stay in place or we can move the entire torso like that with the root bone Some people prefer to put this in kind of like the center of gravity which would be closer to the hips so if you wanted to you could just like bring this up a little and this would be good for you know if you want to make your character do a flip or something like that but just for clarity I'm going to leave it down here for now we can make this easier to look at in a few different ways the way that I usually do because I think it's kind of the least amount of work is just coming over here to object data properties under viewport display you can see we have display as we can set that to any of these things so if you set it to stick this is a lot more minimal and easy to look at I prefer bbone and this is for displaying bendy bones which will add to the arms a little later and right now this looks like way too blocky but you can change how thin or thick these are individually you can that under bone properties right here under bendy bones if you have bones selected you can hold alt while you change the display size right here like that usually what I do though is just select everything press F3 and search for B bone you can see we have this option scale B bone I use this a lot sometimes when I'm setting things up so what I'll do is rightclick it and add it to my quick favorites which just means whenever you press Q you'll have this option right here and that lets you scale it up or down so I like to make all these pretty thin except for some bone B that I use for controlling a lot so for like the ik handbone right here what I could do is press Q now to access the quick favorites and you can just scale that up to be a little bit bigger and it's easier to select now and because this one's longer you can also select the hand separately but I'm going to press contrl Z so that I can select both of these and scale them up at the same time alt shift left click I arm Q for the quick favorites and we can just scale both of these up we can do the same thing for this torso bone right here Q scale that up like that I'm actually going to go into edit mode and just make this whole bone shorter so I'll just turn the length down again you can press F3 to do this and search for B bone or you can add it to your quick favorites like I did let's fix some of the parenting now because you know these bones are not actually set up to have any weights so we can just go into object mode select the coat again shift select this contrl P to parent now again this is already parented but if you do this after adding new deform bones it'll kind of reset the automatic weights so we can go back to automatic weights right here we can see it's working a little bit so this is when we would start getting into weight painting to fix some of those issues but first I'm also going to parent some of the face Parts because right now these are also not doing anything to the face so we can select the eyes shift select the Armature control p parent with automatic weights I think for the hair we can actually join that together all of these have the same modifi fires as you can see so let's just select all of these and contrl J and that will join them into a single object parent that with automatic weights can do that with the eyebrows and we can do that with the mouth all right now we can actually start Weight painting and testing out some of our weights so let's go into pose mode and we can start moving these around it looks like this part of the eye is working okay that one is parented up all right let's just move the control bone so it seems like one of these B is actually controlling the collar so let's fix that let's select the Armature shift select the object that you want to weight paint and you can press control tab to go into weight paint mode or you can go to this menu up here and go into weight paint now when you do this with the Armature selected you'll have this option up here with the bone that you can see and this will let you alt and left click to view a Bone's weight like that and you can also pose them with g r and s so let's look at some of the weight painting settings we have because I think some of the default settings confuse people so let's go over here to the tool Tab and I like to at the bottom under options turn on auton normalize and it makes it so that if you add weight with one bone it will remove it from another bone as you can see these bones keep removing the weights from each other like that this just makes it so that two bones don't really conflict with each other I like to make sure that symmetry is on so you can either set that up here or you can set it up here let's just clear all of these weights by by resetting this to zero and drawing like that now when you have front faces only turned off that means you can paint all the way through the mesh like this you can see that it's painting through to the other side if I have it turned on now it shouldn't go to the other side at all and then under falloff we have the falloff shape you can set this to sphere so if you have something that's really thick it won't go all the way through it but if you have it set to projected it will go all the way through very thick objects but now that you know what they do you can turn them on and off if you need to we can also change the weight up here we can change the radius but I like to change the radius with f right here so since we want to remove weights so that none of the mouth bones actually affect the coat basically what we need to do is click the bone where we actually want it to be assigned and then we can turn the weight up to something like one I'll make the brush a little smaller and we can start painting this in and while we're doing this it should be removing it from the mouth bones up here because of auton normalize so let's just paint it in like that and it looks like we got some over here so let's turn the weight down to zero and we can paint that we can rotate with r to test it let's check the hair it seems like there is some weird stretching so we can fix that also we just have to go back into object mode select the Armature and then shift select the hair and then go back into weight paint mode Let's press the slash button so that we can isolate this again now because of the overlapping this is a good time to talk about masking so we have these other two options up here you can actually press 1 two and three to switch between them just like vertex Edge and face select mode this first one is for face masking the second one is for vertex select and the third one is just for posing so you can see when we're set to masking everything goes gray and we can't actually paint anywhere what this is doing is paying attention to what is selected in edit mode so I'll hover over one of the points and press L to select it and then we can tab back into weight paint mode and you can see that this is the only thing that's selected one thing that might throw you off is if you try to select a bone with alt you can see that is just going to change the selection so you do have to go back into the pose mode right here to select the bone and then you can press one to go back into masking and now we should be able to turn the weight all the way up and paint this without affecting anything else let's also paint this one right here I'll set the weight to 0 five and paint that right here click on the bone select this bone right here go back into mask mode and just make sure that this is 05 also if you want you could make it so that this is deforming it completely it's also going to deform differently if you have your Armature modifier first you can see that if I move it while it's deformed it will change quite a bit so usually I like to have it so that the Armature modifier is before the subdivision this usually leads to more smooth deformation but just choose the way that looks best to you all right back in edit mode Let's press alt a and we can deselect that let's select this second piece of hair now and go back into pose mode select this right here press one to go into masking and then we can paint this bottom part right here and I'll set the middle part to 05 again let's test it out it looks like some of this bone is still messing with the middle piece of hair so I'm just going to move it to the side like that turn the weight down all the way I'll make the brush bigger and we can just weight paint it like that let's check this other piece of hair it seems like that's influencing it too so again I'll just move it far away for now and then I'll weight paint like that again we can reset everything with a alt G and ALT r I'll fix up this last piece of hair select this whole piece with L select this one right here go into masking paint all the way through this can get a little bit tedious but you get used to it over time and depending on how your character is shaped you might not have to do this at all I made a character that has a lot of parts that are really close together so we're going to have to do a fair amount of weight painting for this but it won't be too hard because of how low poly the character is and because we still have a lot of modifiers for example if you moved the Armature modifier to the very end and then applied all of these modifiers right here so it was a mirror a solidify and a subdivision now you have all of these points to deal with plus the solidifier made it so that there are points all the way inside and again that's one reason why I like to put the Armature modifier as close to the top as I can but let's go back into pose mode and test some more stuff out so let's move the arm right here it does look like the arm is poking through a little but I think we can actually fix this by just using bendy bones and remember that I have the bones set to display as B bones and that just means bendy bone so if we select these arm bones right here I'll just select all of them like that we can go to Bone properties and under bendy bones I'll hold alt as I turn this up so I'll just turn this up to something high like 10 and this will make the bones more curvy without you having to add a whole bunch of bone segments now if you have the display set to something else like octahedral you won't actually see the difference in the bones only in the way that it deforms bbone is the only way that you can actually see know how many segments there are it is still poking through a little bit so we can just like push this to the Limit where it's really bad let's select the hand right here go over to modifiers and see if moving this above the subdivision fixes it and it seems like it does we should actually just run through some of the other objects and make sure that the Armature is above everything except for the mirror modifier let's do that with the shoes also we can do that for the mouth the eyes it's not really going to matter too much but I think it's good practice to actually do this now we do have an issue with the whites of the eyes right here because we made it with a shrink wrap modifier so basically as it's deforming it's trying to shrink wrap at the same time and this is going to mess things up so we can actually just apply this and because I've been duplicating the collections as I go I can always revert this change if I really need to and it seems like the eyes are now following the head and don't forget we also have this secret torso under here so I'll push that to the top also if you really want to you can just hide this or delete this but I'm going to leave it here specifically because if I make the character Crouch or if I lift up the legs you'll be able to kind of like see up the shirt so I think this will be good for setting to the same color as the pants the coat deforms pretty terribly right now so let's fix that up I'll just select everything alt G and R I'll go into edit mode I'll select all of the coat bones that are on the side right here and I'll parent them to the thigh so now when the leg moves those bones should follow we can do the same thing to the other side just parent all those to the thigh like that and these two bones I'm going to keep parented to the hip right here which they're already parented so now in pose mode Let's lift one of the legs up like that and we should be able to take this Center one right here and just lift this up a little like that to make it so that it's not clipping in too bad but we can also do some weight painting to make this deform a little bit better because I don't think the weights need to be going as far up the body as they are so let's reset all of this select the Armature shift select the coat right here go into weight paint mode and I'll start tidying up the weights a thing you can also do instead of using face masking is just go into edit mode and you can actually just hide things in here so I'm going to make sure that x-ray mode is turned on I'm just going to select the back half right here and press h and now we don't have to worry about painting through onto other stuff behind us so let's select this bone in the front right here and I'll just start painting through to the other side let's maybe turn these modifiers off to see a little better and I'll just do this going around I just want to make sure that this bottom ring of faces and any of these points inside are getting weight painted select that right here that seems good anything higher than that though I don't really want it to be affecting it so this front bone right here we can turn the weight down and start painting to remove those now if you had it set up like me then this should be mirroring to the other side let's tab back into edit mode alt H to unhide that and I'll select all of this side now and we can hide that go back into weight paint mode and we can keep doing what we're doing let's unhide everything turn these modifiers back on it looks like part of the problem is that the weights are attached to the leg also select the leg bone right here and I'm actually just going to remove all of these weights and it seems like it didn't add it to any of the clothing bones it probably added it to one of these bones right here and it looks pretty good to me this is basically how it work is I just run through bones try to make sure they're deforming correctly it looks like when we move our arm it's actually making some of the whiskers move so let's go back into object mode select the Armature select this part of the face right here go into weight paint mode Let's paint it so this whole thing is being controlled by the headbone right here so select the headbone with alt and left click turn your weights all the way up make sure your strength is all the way up too and then we can paint this and then we'll test it to see if it's moving still this part of the head is moving so we can just do the same thing select the Armature shift select select the head go into weight paint mode Let's weight paint this so the whole thing is following the head also and now this isn't really messing with it which is nice it looks like the body is clipping through a little bit so instead of weight painting the body on the inside we could also just go into object mode select the Torso right here and in edit mode I'll press s and shift Z and we can just make this thinner until it's not really clipping through we should fix the way the foot is deforming now so let's go back into object mode select the Armature shift select the foot control tab go into weight paint mode Let's just select this foot bone right here and I'm actually just going to paint everything red for now so this is what it'll look like if we move the heel I kind of want the upper part of the shoe right here to follow this leg bone so we can tab into edit mode select this part up here with L go back into weight paint mode Let's select this bone right here and then turn masking on and we can just paint this whole thing red now let's go back to posing move this around I like how it follows the leg like that or if you want you could edit the Armature and just move the Pivot Point up to a spot like this so that it pivots a little higher like that this is a pretty stylized character though so I'm not too concerned now I want the toe to deform a little too so that we can have the foot actually Bend so select that bone with the weights turned all the way up I'll just start painting I'm just going to paint into the the tongue of the shoe for now too and we can test it out a little bit I'll set the weight to 0.5 and we'll see how that looks I think that looks pretty good now if the tongue deforming like this is bothering you you have a few options one is you can just weight paint it until it looks good and the second option that I can think of is you give it its own bone like we did with the clothing adding another bone is going to give you the most control but I think what I'll do is I'll just mask it out in edit mode so I'll just make sure that the tongue is selected I'll just reset the pose turn masking on like that a thing I also like to do is just move the other foot into a different spot where I can see it actually deforming like that so maybe select this leg bone turn masking on and what I'll do is turn the strength down to something like 2 so the weight is set to one but every time I start painting it's going to add 0 2 so I just let go I start painting again it adds another point to so you can do this to add weight gradually and I'm going to add more weight to only the underside of the tongue so I'll just make this brush quite a bit smaller like that and this should hide some of the mistakes when the foot is like this it starts to kind of go through so let's try selecting this bone and adding some weights to the top like that and we can see it's kind of starting to come through now I think that's looking okay enough for me but again if you want maximum control you can just add a few more bones in here the last thing I want to do is make it a little easier to control some of these face bones because right now if we want to we can control the eyes like this and I think it looks okay until we move around notice that these are not snapping to the surface so we would have to come in here and like bring this back like that there's actually a much easier way to control this so I'll just reset those bones with alt G and ALT R so with this bone selected I'll go to Bone constraints right here and I'll choose shrink wrap so now we can actually make this snap to another object if we want we could make it snap to the eye right here like that and we can make it rotate depending on the angle of the eye so we can turn on a line to normal right here and I think we need to set this to Y like that and now as we move move it it will rotate right now it's looking a little weird because the bones are completely straight like this but our eyes are not actually angled in that direction an easy way to fix this is making it so that the position of this bone is its default position and the way we can do that is by applying it as the rest pose so we can just press F3 and look for rest pose and you can see we have apply selected as rest pose when we do that the eye will snap back to its default position but the bone will stay the same and if we go in edit mode you can see that it's rotated also this one is not yet and we'll just duplicate it over to the other side but now we should be able to move this around it's changing rotation and it's snapping to the surface right here too if you think it's going too far into the surface you can change the distance like this and you'll also notice that if you try to bring it too far back it's actually going to snap to the back side of the eye so what I like to do is actually make a separate object for shrink wrapping and that's actually really easy to do we can just go back into object mode I'll select the eye I and I'll also select this mouth part right here cuz we're going to do the same thing for these mouth bones right here I'll just shift d to duplicate them and then press slash to isolate them like that so I want to join these together but I don't want them to share all the same modifier so we have to apply some of them so let's apply the solidify right here and we can get rid of the Smooth by angle because we're not going to be seeing it anyway this is just going to be for our bones to reference now we'll select the eyes shift select the mouth and press contrl J and this will join them into a single object we can just name this shrink wrap I'll just hide this part of the mouth for now with h and I'll select this vert in the back and I'll just delete it like that so the ey has nothing to snap to now on the other side alt H to unhide everything we can go back into object mode to find it in the outliner we can hover over it and press period on the numpad and then we can just make sure that it's not visible in the render or in the viewport like that press slash to bring everything back and with the I selected go to Bone constraints instead of the target being the eye we can just search for shrink wrap and now it's shrink wrapping to that object that we have hidden it shouldn't snap to the back side of the eye now and if it's snapping to any other part that you don't like then you can just turn the shrink wrap object back on and we can just delete some of these in here so I'll just expand this selection like that and delete all of these faces on the top hide it again press slash and it's a little better in edit mode Let's just delete this bone like that and we can just symmetrize this one and now our eyes are much easier to control let's do the same thing for the mouth right here so with that selected we can go to Bone constraints at a shrink wrap look for the shrink wrap object like that we can make this align to the normal also set this to Y and if you don't want it to move at all then you can apply the selected as rest pose like that but for the mouth I'm going to leave it I think that's fine and now we should be able to move the mouth to the side we can rotate it a little make the character Smile or frown or whatever we want and we don't have to do a lot of extra work to get it to rotate correctly which is nice if you want to keep this torso object right here you could just make it the same color as the pants so I'll do that really quickly just like in the last video I just go to UV editing I'll select the pants and then I'll select that object tab into edit mode select everything you can see that we have one on the white and one on this color over here so I'll just select the white part and move it over now it's the same color and now it just kind of looks like an extension of the pants which is nice now we can talk about some posing options so I told you that it's important to putl and R at the end of Bones and that's so that you can use symmetry so right now if we move our hand you know the other side isn't moving but if we want now we can turn on symmetry up here and the other side should move because all of the bones are named properly another thing you can do when this is turned off let's just reset this you can make an asymmetrical pose and now let's select these bones and we can copy the pose with contrl c and we can flip it to the other side with contrl shift V so that basically just made it symmetrical but let's flip the pose completely so I'll just press contrl Z I'll select everything with a again control C contrl shift V and that will flip the pose you can contrl V to paste it control shift V to paste the pose but flipped this is really useful for posing and doing animation let's reset this with crl g crl rrl s we made sure that the bone roll looked good for all of our bones and that makes it so that for chains of Bones like this it Bec much easier to curl them around basically what you can do is you can just select all of them press period to change your pivot point to individual Origins then press r x and x and we can actually curl all of these at the same time into a fist like that which is really useful I use the local rotation a lot you can actually change the default up here right now it's set to Global but you can change it to local so that you can just press R and X this just makes it so you don't have to press X twice to go into local rotation and you can actually see in the upper left corner whether it's on the local X or if it's on the global X like that and with the mouth to we could make a really easy frown or a smile by turning on Symmetry and then rotating this on the local xais like that right now our character is still made of a bunch of separate objects and that's okay you can leave it like this but if you want to start applying modifiers and joining objects together you can do that now and because the weight painting is already done it shouldn't mess anything up if we select our coat we can see all the modifiers right here anything that is before the Armature modifier that's safe to apply so we could apply this and you can see that nothing has really changed the solidify we can apply that and you can see that it changes very slightly but it's not changing too much generally I think that it's okay to apply the solidify after the Armature modifier but if we have a subdiv that's after the Armature and we apply that you can see things get kind of broken just so I don't mess anything up I am going to duplicate this collection also so anything before the Armature I'm applying and I'll apply all the solidify modifiers too everything has the same modifiers now so it should be safe to join everything together I'll just select the coat press a to select everything else and press contrl J and everything will be joined into a single object now except for this shrink wrap object I know this is a lot to take in so you can check out this playlist for some more rigging videos and I'm sure you want to know how to animate these so you should watch these videos next to learn all about that thanks for watching and have a good one

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 38,782

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Id: m-Obo_nC3SM

Length: 59min 26sec (3566 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024