Rigging Made Easy, Skeleton Character || Blender 2.93

[Music] in this one we're going to rig this skeleton character that we made a few videos ago rigging is a topic that i'm still learning about and trying to get better at so what i'm showing you isn't necessarily the absolute best way it's just how i've been doing it and as i learn better rigging techniques i'll make more videos to bring everybody up to speed so subscribe if you don't want to miss anything also check my patreon for all the project files for my videos coupon codes for free gumroad products and a bunch of other files that i don't share anywhere else i also donate some of the profits to environmental causes each month link is in the description here's a summary of what we'll cover we'll start by adding in an armature and placing all of the deforming bones making sure the axes are pointing the right way and that they have proper names then we'll go through and make all the bones we need for inverse kinematics and controlling our rig we'll also talk about how to use drivers to make switches that let you turn the ik on and off then we'll parent everything up and do a small amount of weight painting until everything deforms correctly alright let's get started here we are in blender i'm using version 2.93 and we have our skeleton from the previous video right here we're just going to get started with the armature hit shift a to add in an armature right here usually i like to go over here to object data properties i can go over to viewport display and turn on in front i like to turn the names on and the axes also so then you can tab into edit mode this one i'm going to start with the hip so i'll bring that up right here just so it's kind of covering the hip bones right there you can also look from the side and go into x-ray mode with alt z just to see through your model so i'll drag the head over to kind of like the base of the hips and this over to like where the spine is starting then i'll extrude this up the spine and i'll have one bone that's for the ribs right here and then one for the neck this one will be for the head and then for the legs i'm going to just duplicate this bone right here you can see it's already parented to our hip bone right here and so i'll put this right there bring this down to the knee and eventually we're going to change all the axes and spin these around so don't worry too much about which way they're pointing and just try to get them into the right position you can check from the side we need to line this up a little better over here and for this i'm only focusing on this one side right here which is the it's going to be the left side of our character the right side of our screen we'll extrude this for the foot down to right there we're going to have a spot in the middle where the foot bends a little and i want this to be following that toe right there so the way i like to do this is by hitting period changing the pivot point to active element then you can select this front one and then the back one and this one is active right now and when you rotate it you can see it's rotating from that head right there you can look from the top and just kind of line it up actually one thing that might be better just delete this bone right here and then bring this to the tip and then you can right click it and subdivide it like that then all you have to do is select this bone you can change the length when you hit n to open up the side panel right here you can change the length of it like that i'll switch back to median point for the pivot point now so now we can work on the arms so from right here i'll just extrude for a collarbone move that over here so it's kind of in the center then i'm going to extrude a bone right here but i want to disconnect it so i'll select it hit alt p and disconnect bone so you can see it's disconnected but it's still parented that's what this dotted line is we can line this up for the arm now so place that here right at the shoulder right there extrude this out towards the wrist i want to make sure that's actually in the right spot it looks like it is not and i want there to be a very slight bend in these that'll help us with uh our rig later extrude this out this is just gonna be for the hand just controlling this little spot right there and then we'll uh extrude again and i'm just gonna disconnect this with alt p and then we can move this grab the tail and put that towards the tip of the finger and we can basically just duplicate this over for each finger like that and just line them up so you can just select these right click subdivide and then you'll see a little box down here where you can change the number of cuts so normally i would set this to two but i'm actually going to set it to three and then when i pose the fingers i'll only pose the top three but you can add as many cuts as you want i'll do the same thing for this right click subdivide and instead of three cuts i'll add two we can add some for our eyes too so you can tab out of edit mode go back into object mode and select the eyes go into edit mode and i'll just select this one eye you can just hover over it and hit l and then shift s cursor to selected so it'll snap to the very center right there you can go back to your rig right here and hit shift a and it'll spawn that bone right where the cursor is then i'll select that bone and hit period to change the pivot point to active element and we can just rotate this by negative 90 degrees like that and we can also scale it down to whatever size we want i usually like to scale it so it's just poking out of the eye a little so next i'm going to position the axes where i want them and basically i like to choose kind of like a primary axis that i rotate the bones on most often and for me i like to use the x-axis for instance when we rotate the spine we want it to bend going this way and it looks like the x-axis is already positioned that way and to edit them you can hit end to open up the side panel over here you just want to select your bone and change this roll and if you want to rotate multiple bones at the same time you can shift select them and before you change the roll you have to hold alt and you can see now it's rotating multiple bones like that so these two i also want to rotate so just select both of those hold alt and then we can turn those until the x is pointing at us the hand bone i think i want it to rotate going this way so it looks like the x is pretty close we'll see if we can tweak that at all that looks pretty good i'll have the z pointing at us and we'll just do the same thing for the fingers so it looks like they're already pretty close um i do want the x pointing this way so that when they curl on the x they're curling like that so i'll just rotate these until they're pointing at us and to select a whole bunch i like to hit c to circle select and you can use your scroll wheel to change the size just select as many as you want kind of like like a brush and when you're done you can just right click so just go through and rotate all these until they look good what's going on here i must have messed this up at some point so these definitely need to be moved a little one thing you can do is check from the top and see which direction these are pointing because the foot is kind of at an angle uh one thing you can do is rotate these so that the z is pointing towards the toe maybe right around there it's hard to hard to get it right but this is something you can always change later so if it's not looking good you can always just adjust it and the foot i want the x to be pretty flat going this way so i'll just grab both of these and make it so the x is sideways and the z is pointing up and we can test this out by uh going into pose mode you can do that up here and to test it you can just select a bone hit r and then x twice and see if it rotates the way you want it to so these are looking pretty good you can do the same thing for the fingers so i'll just select all of these fingers right here i'm not selecting the first one right there and i'll change the pivot point to origins and now when you hit r and x twice they kind of curl like that instead of moving in one solid chunk so you can see when i move that on the x it's moving the way you would expect a hand to move so with the axis all set up i'm just going to run through and start naming all of the bones so this will be hips spine 1 spine 2 neck head there is an add-on that i like to use for renaming big groups of bones like this it's called the simple renaming panel and it's free i'll put a link in the description but basically i just change this target to bone and then you can select all of the bones you want to change and so i'll just rename them all finger and when you hit replace names and have only selected right here it'll just change all of these like that so now we have finger zero zero one zero zero two if i wanted to be more organized you could just have like thumb and then like thumb one two three uh index or finger 1 finger 2 finger 3 have it numerated that way now that we have all these names i want to make sure that everything on this side has a dot l at the end and this will allow us to do cool things like mirror poses and flip poses and stuff like that so an easy way to do that is just select everything right click names auto name left and right like that and you can see it put a dot l on everything that is on the left side it looks like some of the things in the middle also have a dot l so i'm just going to press ctrl z for this you want to make sure that your 3d cursor is in the center so shift s cursor world origin like that we can change our pivot point to 3d cursor now select everything that's in the middle in edit mode hit s to scale x and then zero and if any of these bones that are supposed to be in the middle are not in the middle that will just pull them towards the center and make them perfectly in the middle so now hopefully if we select everything right click go to names auto name left and right you can see everything in the center won't have a dot l appended to it which is just what we want now that we have these named correctly we can start making control bones that'll make controlling our uh our armature just a lot easier so the first bone i'll add is a root bone and this is what all of our bones are going to be parented to it'll allow us to move our entire character if we want so you can hit shift a to add in a new bone i'll switch the pivot point back to active element i'll rotate that on the x by 90 degrees and i just want the z to be pointing up i just like it to match our like world's direction and i'll just scale that down a little so it's not massive we can rename that root and let's just parent our hips to that because right now our hips are at like the very top of the chain it's like the biggest parent in our armature so we'll just parent that to the root ctrl p keep offset now let's start setting up the ik for the arm so right now we have fk which means if we want to move the hand we have to move the bicep first and then the forearm like that ik will allow us to move these two bones by moving the hand it's kind of like a way of letting a child control their parents back in edit mode we can just duplicate the hand bone right here and then i want to scale it up a little or you can just change the length over here and this is going to be our ik bone for our arm so i'll rename that ik dot arm dot l at the end too so that blender knows it's on the left side and we want to hit alt p and clear the parent because we don't want it to be connected to anything over here it'll just kind of mess things up when we start to add constraints and we also need a target bone and this will let the rig know which way we want the elbow to be pointing in this case we want the elbow to be pointing down when it bends so i'll just select this right here and e to extrude and extrude that down on the z for this i'll also hit alt p and clear parent and we'll just drag it down a little like that i'll rename that target dot arm dot l one thing we didn't do is name our armature so i'll just rename this uh armature skelly so let's set up the ik now we just have to go into pose mode up here we can select the ik bone we just created and then shift select the forearm and you can come over here to bone constraint properties and add in the inverse kinematics constraint like that or you can use the shortcut shift i like that so now when we move the ik controller for our arm you can see it's moving like all of our other bones and that's because we have the chain length set to zero so we just need to change this to two and then it will move these two bones right here and it is looking pretty good but we still need to set the pole target so select that choose the armature then select the bone which i named target and now it flipped around so we have to rotate the pole angle right here and just rotate that i think that should be negative 90 and we can test it out again to see we can test it out again to see if it worked it looks like it's bending in the right direction so if yours isn't bending in the right direction it might be because you need to point the elbow in edit mode towards the target if it's not pointed the right way it won't bend the right way like that so you just need to come into edit mode and just pull this very slightly until it's pointing towards the target it doesn't have to be a severe bend it just can't be straight or pointing in the wrong direction basically another thing i like to do is select the hand bone come over to bone constraints and make sure you're using bone constraints because there's this other constraint tab if you're choosing things from there it's not going to work right under bone constraints add a copy rotation select your armature then you can select uh ik arm like that and now when we move the ik controller for our arm you can see the hand bone will also rotate and that's kind of nice because now we don't have to move two bones around we can just use one that'll also help for uh if you're trying to make your character do like a push-up or something like that you don't want their hands moving around and this will help the hands uh stay in place okay so next we're gonna add some controllers to the feet and this is gonna be a little more complicated than the hand and if you want a more in-depth tutorial about this i already made one about foot rigging and you can go check that out if you want some more details we need to be in edit mode i'll start off with the target so we can extrude from the knee i'll just do that on the y axis and you want to alt p clear the parent and we can pull this out i want to reset the roll just to keep it neat and i'll rename that target dot leg dot l and i want this to be kind of at like the tip of our toe because that's where we want our knee bending towards i also want to add an ik bone i want it to be the same exact orientation as this bone right here so i'll just duplicate that bone and then we can change the length to make it a little bigger so it's easier to select and i also want to clear the parent with alt p and i'll rename that ik dot leg dot l so the reason this is going to be a little more complex than the arm is because i want the foot to be able to pivot from this point right here i also want to be able to pivot from the toe and from the heel so we need to add bones for each of those so we'll just select this this joint right here and extrude that on the z i'll extrude one from the toe and we can hit shift a to add one for the heel i'm just going to change the active element and rotate this negative 90 and i just want to place the thick part the head at the heel right here and make sure that it's actually on the heel and i'll check it from the top because i want to make sure that it's pointing in the direction of our foot so i'll just make it way bigger and then rotate it until it's kind of aligned and then we can scale it back down now we know it's pointing in the right direction okay so we have all of these bones we just need to make sure that none of them are parented because if they're parented to any of these bones that we extruded them from it's not going to work right and i can rename them so this one i'll rename something like pivot foot dot l and they're probably better naming conventions to use than these ones but this is what i've been using lately i'll rename this one pivot tail dot l pivot heel dot l now we can go into pose mode and start setting things up i'll select that ik bone the ik for the foot shift select this shift i and ik to active bone now we'll set the chain length to two and we'll test it out to see if it's working so it does look like it's moving but we need to set up the target so select your armature and then we can search target leg like that and once again we need to rotate this so i'll just rotate this until it's pointing towards the toe right here which is 90 degrees test it out again see how it's working it seems like it's pretty good if it's not you can just go into edit mode and move this slightly and just you know compare it and if you want to reset your bone location and all that you can just select everything with a alt g to reset the location and alt r to reset the rotation so now we can actually parent these bones up down here to make sure that it's like pivoting correctly back in edit mode what we want to do is parent the ik bone that we have selected right here to this pivot bone right here with keep offset and we're basically just going to parent it down the chain like that and then we'll parent the toe to the heel we're basically going to be controlling our foot movement from our heel select this bone then select the pivot toe and ctrl p keep offset and parent the toe to the heel it's still not working correctly and that's because we want the rotation of our foot bone right here to match the rotation of the ik controller so we can add a constraint just like we did for the hand just select your foot bone come over to bone constraints copy rotation armature and this one is named ik leg so ik leg l like that and now you can see that the foot is actually pivoting from that point right there but we need the toe to continue to point at the pivot toe right there so there is kind of an easy trick for this and it's using an ik constraint when you have an ik chain set to just one it basically just makes it so that one bone is pointing directly at another you can see that when i move this it's just the calf pointing directly towards this ik controller right here all we have to do is select the pivot bone shift select the toe shift i and to active bone and just make sure the chain length is one and now when we rotate this you can see that this is pointing towards the toe still like that and when we rotate this the whole foot is pivoting from the toe because this is the biggest parent in the chain we can also pivot from the heel and also because this is the biggest parent in the chain when you move your foot you want to make sure that you're moving it with the heel and if you want to make this easier to remember you can just come over to the pivot bone and turn off location like that so that when you try to move it it doesn't work you can just do that for all the bones that you shouldn't move the only bone that it allows you to move is the heel bone right there another thing that i like to do actually is parent the target to the heel and that way when we rotate from the heel you can see that it like follows the target bone actually follows the foot another thing that i like to do is make it so that when i move the hips the uh the head doesn't rotate so we can add another ik bone up here so i'll just go back into edit mode and duplicate this and then make it slightly taller like that i will hit alt p clear the parent and we can just rename this ik dot spine and back in pose mode with that selected we'll shift select our neck shift i and ik to active bone i want the chain to be controlling everything going down but not the hips so i think that would be three so that is looking good if we set it too high it yeah it doesn't work right so we had it right with three and then we can do the same thing we did with our hand where we select the head bone right here and add a copy rotation and make sure that it's copying the rotation of that ik controller which is called ik spine so now we can move things with this and the head will stay and it'll also allow us to move our hips up and keep our head in the same place too instead of moving all over the place so the reason we made the root bone is so that when we move it all of the other bones will follow and you can see not all of them are parented so we can just select all of the bones that aren't parented in edit mode so i'll just move all of the bones over here and then select all of these bones that aren't parented and then back in edit mode we can just shift select the root ctrl p and keep offset so now all of those stray bones are parented to the root i want the eye to be parented to the head so that when the head rotates so does the eye when we move this yeah everything follows which is good so if you want to be able to turn off the ik or the copy rotation for anything you can basically just select the bone with the constraint on it and change this influence right here it'll just kind of snap back like that it'll snap back to its normal position and not recognize the ik constraint but if you're posing your character and you're in the middle of an animation and you want to switch between them it can be kind of annoying to come over to here and find all of the sliders so a thing we can do is create controller bones that basically change this influence for us we can do that with drivers i'll just come in here to edit mode and create a bone up here you can scale that down so i'll rename this switch dot ik dot arm dot l it's kind of long and i want the roll to be zero and we can make sure that this is parented to the root also so now just select the bone with the ik constraint on it and over here right click and add driver and for the object we want to select the armature and then we want to select the bone which we named switch so basically what this is saying now is that when we move our switch bone and the x location in the world space the influence is going to be the same number so i don't want this to be in the world space i want this to be in the local space you know right now in local space this is zero i know that because if i press alt g nothing happens you can see if i move it over here the location changes and when i hit alt g it goes back to zero this is the local location and i want this to move down on the y the y location so i know that when i come in here i can right click edit driver i'm going to set this to y location in the local space right here so now you can see the more i move it down the more it turns off but i don't want to have to move it this much once again right click edit driver we can change this expression up here to something like times 10. that seems like a good distance and if we want we can make it so it's like not moving all over the place by adding a constraint so we can add a constraint over here limit location we can turn everything on and again we want this to be in the local space and we only want it to be moving in the y so i want the minimum to be negative 0.1 and now it'll only move in that direction right there i just want to change the maximum to 0.1 and the reason i chose 0.1 is because in the driver we multiplied it by 10 so over here we have to divide it by 10 for them to match up correctly if that makes any sense all right so now we have a way to turn the ik on and off but i don't like how when this is at its default position the ik is turned off so what i'll do in the driver is at the very end is add 1 and i'll change the minimum to negative 0.1 and now when it's at its default position this is on all the way and when we move it down now it's off so that's what we wanted to do um if you want you can do the same thing for the copy rotation right here in edit mode i can just duplicate this right here i'll just rename this something like switch.rotation.arm.l so we can just copy the driver over here copy driver and then find the one with the copy rotation on it and paste the driver and then we can edit it and change this bone right here to what did we name it this one right here so now when we move this one we can turn the copy rotation on and off if you want you can do the same thing for the head and the same thing for the legs so you basically just have to duplicate these and rename them paste the driver and just make sure that the bone is different and for the leg i'm just going to make it one controller for both so i can just copy this driver and then paste it over here so we have one switch for both the rotation and the ik of the leg if you want you can do the same thing with the head over here and i'll duplicate this and we can come over here and bring the head location down to zero for x and the tail also and it'll snap in the middle so we can select this bone now and paste that driver edit it and make sure that it's using the right bone and we'll do the same thing for this one right here copy the driver and paste it over for the copy rotation so now we have one controller for the ik and the rotation of the head so now i'm just going to come over here and turn off the names and the axes and if you want you can also change the display to a different type like stick or something that's not as like cluttered what i like to do is b bone then you can just select all of these bones in edit mode and i think it's i want to say it's ctrl alt s yeah ctrl alt s lets you scale the b bones and if you don't remember that you can just hit f3 and search for scale and find scale b bone right there ctrl alt s and scale them down to whatever size you want i usually like to keep them pretty small and you can select ones that are overlapping like this so i can select this one and scale it up with ctrl alt s so now it's a little easier to grab this bone right here select this bone up here ctrl alt s and you can actually just hit x to scale it only on the x-axis like that so now we can easily grab both bones like that do the same thing for any bones that are overlapping that you want to be able to grab more easily another thing we need to do is run through and make sure that all of the bones that we don't want to be deforming our mesh aren't deforming it so you can see when you select a bone right here and then go over to bone properties we have this little check box that says deform we know that's a deforming bone for instance we don't want our root bone to be deforming so if we select that we can just turn off deform right here but what i like to do is try to select all of the bones shift select all of the bones and when you come over here if you hold alt first it will turn off deforming for all of the bones that you have selected so we can just run through and do that for all of the bones that we don't want to be deforming so any of the control bones any of the ik bones we can do that for our heel bone too another thing we can do is add bones to certain layers to make it not as cluttered so you can do that by coming over here to object data properties the little running person and you can see we have layers over here and when you click on a square it's gonna you know your bones are to disappear that's because all of our bones are on this one layer right here if you want to show multiple layers you can just shift select these squares like that so what i like to do is put all of my controlling bones that i use regularly on one layer and then all of the deforming bones and things that i don't use as often on other layers for instance one bone that we're never going to use anymore is the ik bone for our foot so we don't really want to rotate it ever because now we have this bone right here that allows our foot to pivot from that spot in the middle so you can just select that bone hit m to move and i'll just put it over here so i'll just put all the bones that i don't want to use pretty much ever just over here then i can select everything and move that to the second layer and now i'll just select the control bones that i want to be using most often and put them on the first layer m to move and just move them to the first layer so i'll just do that for the rest these two bones head bones i'll grab the eye and the hips so these are the bones that we're going to be using most often to control things and if we want to do something like move our hand bones then we can come over to the second layer this is totally preferential i usually just split things up between two main layers if you want you can totally make way more layers and now we're ready to flip everything to the other side so what you want to do is make sure you select all all of the layers that you just made you can just shift select those you want to go into edit mode select everything and then right click and symmetrize and basically everything that had a dot l is going to be flipped to the other side and we can test things out to see if they work correctly but because we did all of the constraints control bones and all that everything should be working correctly if we did it right sometimes you might have to come in here and move the the pole angle had situations where the pull angle will be wrong when we flip it to the other side so it's a good idea to check these things out make sure that they work you also have to come in here and replace all of the drivers because the drivers don't actually flip so that's kind of annoying but it's not too bad you can basically just copy all the drivers from this side can paste them over here and then you just need to edit the driver so that it's using the dot r instead so i'll just run through and do that for everything and because we named things correctly you should be able to move bones on one side and then hit ctrl c and ctrl shift v and that will uh mirror the pose from one side to the other like that if you select all of your bones you have an asymmetrical pose select all of them hit ctrl c and ctrl shift v also to basically just flip it to the other side like that and that comes in handy a lot when you uh when you start animating but i'm sure you noticed that this isn't actually parented to our skeleton so we have to do that next so we can go back into object mode we can select our body and ctrl shift select the armature and hit ctrl p and normally i would use automatic weights but you can see when we do that it gives us this error right here and i think that is because we have a lot of overlapping objects in here and blender doesn't really know how to treat them but that's okay because we're going to use a slightly different method for this anyway so i'm just going to hit ctrl z to make sure that i'm undoing the parenting action that i did instead we're going to hit ctrl shift p and choose with empty groups and we'll do the same thing for the eyes and for the head so i'll just shift select both of those and then the armature ctrl p with empty groups and now when you select your body and go over here to object data properties you can see we have a vertex group for every deforming bone so remember when we went through and we're unchecking the deform button for all of those bones basically there won't be any vertex groups for any of those bones so that's why we did that now a thing that we can do come into edit mode when you hover over an object and hit l it'll select that whole piece basically what you want to do is make sure weight is all the way up select the bone it might be a little easier if you select your armature and turn on names right here so you can actually see what names everything is you want to go into edit mode so you just want to select your bone over here and then you can just hit assign and now you can see when we are in pose mode now our hips are attached like that and so this method is okay to do with the skeleton because we have a lot of disconnected pieces and we don't really need you know i'm not gonna try to make these bones bend i just want them to follow each bone that they're associated with so for bones that you want to bend um like the spine right here there i have a different method for treating those select your armature go into pose mode and then go under edit and turn off lock object modes right here you can select your body over here and go into weight paint mode so i'm doing that with ctrl tab weight paint right here and this will let you select bones with ctrl and left click like that you can also um shift select to get multiple bones over here so basically just select all of the bones you want to use so for this i'm just selecting all of the spine bones and then under weights you can do assign automatic for bones and then we can move things around to test them out so it might be hard to see with all these names floating around but you can see now that the spine is actually moving and it grabbed onto to a few other things that we have to clean up basically i'm going to do this for any part that i want to bend i'm going to ignore the toes and i'll come back to that later but you can do the same thing for your fingers over here so you can just select all of your fingers and i'll come over to the other side and also shift select all of the fingers over here and do the same thing come up to weights assign automatic from bones and once again if we're in individual origins we can check to see if those look good and it seems like it looks fine but again we're going to have to clean some stuff up first like the hand bones right there so that's why i like to do the automatic weights first and then we can clean things up after now that we have that taken care of we can turn lock object modes back on and i'll just go into object mode select our mesh and go into edit mode and we can continue doing things the way that we were doing them before so let's see what we have to clean up over here it looks like it's pulling some points from our collarbone right here so we can clean that up and we can also clean the ribs up too so back in edit mode i'll select the ribs right here to select the ribs and the collar bone for spine one right here i just want to make sure again that weight is all the way up and we can just hit remove like that and basically everything we have selected um will be removed from this bone right here so i'll do the same thing for spine two just remove and i'll remove for the neck also yeah now you can see that only the spine is following so i'll select the ribs and i'm just going to parent all of that to spine too assign and i'll select this shoulder right here this collarbone assign that to shoulder dot l so if you want to search you can hit this little arrow right here and just type in shoulder dot l like that assign we can do the same thing over here for dot r like that and every once in a while you can go back and move things around to see if they're working properly and it looks like they are so now i'll just run through and basically do that for everything so i'll start with bicep choose this bone right here that bone select bicep assign for the forearm i'm gonna select these bones right here assign for the hand bone we can select it over here and then click this arrow and remove from all groups and that will make it so that the fingers aren't influencing it and then we can assign it to the hand and it should work fine you just have to do that on the other side also so it looks like our upper body is parented just fine except for our head we can select our head basically just select everything with a and i'll just search for head select that and assign make sure the weight is set to one you can do the same thing for our eyes a sign so we'll do the same thing for the legs and i'll select this bone at the bottom too for the calf for the foot i'm just going to select everything down here and i'll handle the toe a little later and now i just want to do the other side so it looks like everything is parented properly so for the toes i'm just going to select the vertex group over here for our toe bone and i'm going to go into face select and just select the tips right here and i'm just going to hit control plus until those expand to about this point where that pivot bone is so select the vertex group for the foot and hit remove and then on the toe over here you can hit assign like that and i'll do that to the other side also and now you can see it's bending right there so the deformation looks a little weird and usually the first thing i like to do is select the mesh go over to the modifiers and try putting the armature modifier before the subdivision surface and a lot of the time that smooths it out quite a bit in a way that i think looks better basically what it's doing is deforming everything uh looking like this before it adds the subdivision surface modifier so it's just deforming fewer points we can do that for our head and for our eyes too but it honestly doesn't matter too much because it's just going to move everything one thing that i did is i added a shape key for the hips right here so that they are flattened out a little because i was running into a problem where they were touching my ribs a lot when i was moving my my armature around so that's a pretty easy thing to do basically all you have to do is come over to shape keys and hit this button for a basis hit the plus button again for your first key right here and then with the second key selected you can just come into edit mode and make the change changes that you want so basically i just selected some points over here and moved them around then when you come over here you can just turn that up to blend into that shape key as much as you want so if you want to be able to control your eyes more easily you can add in a bone for them to point at so we can do that in edit mode i'll just hit shift a to add in a bone and i'll just move it up like this ctrl alt s to make it a little skinnier so now this is in the very center and you can just put it as high or low as you want i'll just put that like close to in front of the eyes make sure that it's not deforming we can rename it something like control dot eyes and i want to parent that to our root bone down here we need to do this in pose mode you can select the eyes and then go over here to bone constraints and add a damped track like that and then select your armature and you want to select that bone so i named that control dot eyes now we can select the other eye shift select this and then copy copy constraints to selected bones like that and that will just duplicate it over so now when we move this you can see that those bones are following that will allow us to move our eyes more easily too you can move it kind of anywhere and if you want you can always turn the influence down to move your eyes whatever way you want all right that's it for this one once again the project files for all my videos can be found on patreon i'm planning on doing a few videos about character animation so subscribe if you don't want to miss those and i do read all the comments so if you leave a suggestion i might end up making a video about it i'd like to thank my patrons for their support and i'd like to thank you for watching have a good one

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 6,871

Keywords:

Id: wcU-vTz-lZ0

Length: 39min 13sec (2353 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 09 2021