RPG graphics E02: Character rig [Blender]

hi everyone in this video we're going to be setting up a simple rig to allow us to easily pose the player model so the first thing I'd like to do is just scale the character down to a more human size I usually consider the default cube to be 2 meters high so I'm going to press shift C to make sure the 3d cursor is centered press tab to go into object mode and then shift a to add unit cube as a scale reference I can then scale our character down so that it's just a little bit under 2 meters and then I'll delete the cube and move the character up on the z axis so this feet are just resting on the red line of the x-axis which is sort of the ground plane then with the character selected in object mode or press ctrl-a and apply firstly is location which is just going to Center the origin in the scene and then ctrl a to apply is scale as well now we not only need the reference images of course so I'll press n to quickly bring up the properties panel and just disable background images and then press n to close that once again now to start creating the actual rig let's make sure we're still an object mode and I press shift a and add in a single bone armature I'll and press tab to go into edit mode on the armature and select the bone and press G and Z to move this up on the z axis so that the head of the bone sits at the base of the pelvis now this is a little bit hard to see in wireframe mode the flap I said in your dissolute aiding mode it's not much better so I'll go over here to this little person icon which is the armature settings and I will turn on x-ray in the display options so that we can properly see the bone and then I'm going to right click to grab the tail of the bone here and press G and on sealians edge to move this down on the z axis just to somewhere around where the belly button would be and then I'm going to extrude this out with II always constraining to the z axis so that remains perfectly in the center and I'll move this up to the start of the chest and then I'll extrude that once more on the z-axis to the base of the neck once again on the z-axis to the top of the neck and one final time to the top of the head and let's look at this front side view mostly seems about right I'll just move this in a little bit and shift that over there just something like that and I'm going to switch over to front view and select the neck bone and by shifty and drag that out to duplicate it and I'll grab the tail and bring that over to the start of the arm so this is just forming the shoulder bone and you can see that there's this black dotted line connecting it to the tip of the chest bone and this just means that it is parented to the chest bone and that's because we copied it from the neck bone which is also parented to the chest bone let's just look at this from side view it seems to be lined up about right so we can then select the tip and just e to extrude it down to the elbow and I'll extrude that once more to the base of the hand extrude it once for the hand bone once for the first finger bone and once again for the lower half of the fingers just go to the front and start adjusting this from here okay so these two bones here will handle all of the fingers since it is a mitten hand but we do need a bone for the thumb so I'm going to duplicate that from the first finger bone so that it's also parented to the hand bone and let me just move this up to the base of the thumb and this to the tip of the thumb let me see that from side view let's get this lined up correctly all right and actually want to bones along the thumbs if the thumb can bend so I can select the bone and press W to bring up the specials menu and just subdivide the bone like so and then I'll drag that out to get the bend of the thumb alright so that is the arm done with n need to worry about the legs I want the legs to be parented to this hip bone so I mean to select the spine bone which is parented to the hip bone and duplicate that with 50 and bring that to the start of the leg and I'll grab the tail and drag that down to around the knee and extrude that out to the base of the foot I'm going to go into side view and just adjust this from there and then I'll extrude the lower leg bone to form this foot bone which will rest at the start of the toes and I'll extrude that out once more to the tip of the toes and from front view let me come and adjust this here as well just so it all lines up now I'd like to fix the weird twisting going on with some of these bones like this one and this one over here so I'm going to press a to just select all of the bones in edit mode and then I'll press ctrl n do make sure that you're in edit mode not object mode otherwise it'll start up a new file and this will bring up recalculate row and from front view I'll just ask it to recalculate based on the view access you can see these will all now line up with the front view so this is the main part of our rig done so I'm going to press ctrl tab to go into pose mode or you can just select that from the menu over here and I just want to make sure that all of the parenting is set up correctly so if I grab the chest bone over here and rotate that should see the neck head and the arm rotating along with that so I rotate the hand bone should see the fingers and the thumb rotating with that and if I move or rotate the hip buon should see everything it goes along with that so if you made a mistake somewhere and say duplicated the wrong bone and something ended up parented to something that it shouldn't be parented to I suppose you want to show you how to fix that so going into edit mode on the bones you can clear a parent by selecting the bone and pressing alt P and clear parent like so and you can see the black dotted line has disappeared and then to parent it to the correct bone you start out with this burn selected then shift select the bone you want to parented to ctrl P and then you can parent it either connected or keep offset so for this bone we want to keep offset but bones like the spine bone here which is physically connected to the hip bone would be parented connected okay so the rig isn't completely finished yes I still want to add in the I K system to make the legs a little easier to control but I go if you want to go through and name all of the bones that we have so far so we're going to little bone icon here I'll name this the hips bone then this will be the spine followed by the chest then the neck and lastly the head and then for these bones on the characters left I'm going to follow a specific naming convention which is to first write the name of the bone so in fes shoulder and then dot capital L for the left all right so I'll follow that for all of these bones this is upper arm dot capital L lower arm dot capital L and so on and I know this is a little bit tedious but it is fairly important the reason it's important a platform is being nice and tidy is that when we mirror the bones from the left side over to the right side a little bit later on and we ask it to flip the it will recognize the convention and you'll be able to name all of the bones on the right with dot R instead of dot L and then it will know which bone on the left of the character corresponds to which bone on the right and that means that if we set up a pose on one half of the character we can ask it to then copy that pose over to the other side of the character and this is going to save us a lot of time when animating okay so I've just finished naming the last bone toes a dot L let's now go ahead and create the iQue bones so I'm going to press three to go to side view and I'll select the tail of the lower leg bone and just press e to extrude this out I'll select the bone and press alt P to clear the parent so it's now a free bone and then someone mysteriously if you've never seen this before I'm going to left-click somewhere out here level with the knee and press shift H adding a new bone and just have this pointing forwards and with this bone selected I'm going to come over here and turn off the form in the bone properties and that's just because this is a control bone which means that it doesn't directly affect any of the vertices in the mesh but rather it helps to control the other bones now this is going to be called the pull target dot L and this bone that we created down here it's also not a defamation bone so I'll toggle that off and this is going to be leg I K standing for inverse kinematics dot capital L and quickly from the front view and they just make sure that this pull target bone is positioned in front of the left knee like so and then coming into side view again I'm going to go into pose mode and I will first select this AI cabe own and then shift right click to select the lower leg bone and note that the order of this is important first the I cable then the lower leg bone and then I'll press shift ctrl C and is going to bring up the add constraint with targets menu and I can choose inverse kinematics and the lower leg bone should turn yellow we can then head over to this panel here with the icon of the bone and the chain link which is the bone constraints panel and we can see our inverse kinematics constraint now in past rigging videos of mine people have had some difficulties with that shortcut so I'm going to remove the bone constraint and quickly show you how to do this manually so you'd select the lower leg bone and in the same bone constraint panel we can add inverse kinematics and then from the target field here we can choose armature and the target bone will be the i key bone so we can search for that leg I K and we're now at the same place as if we use the shortcut for the pull target we then choose armature once again and the bone is of course our pull target all right immediately things have gone a bit crazy but there are two things that we need to adjust the first is chain length which we need to change to two because the number of bones in the leg is two and then you can see that these leg has become twisted well it may not have in your case depending on the bones rotation but in my case it certainly has so I can change the pole angle and this looks to be 90 degrees off so just enter 90 degrees over there what we should now see so I just going to side view is that I can have some sort of control of the leg just by moving this eye cable now in my case things aren't looking so good I want the leg to stick up this way in a of natural fashion but instead it's determined to stick off weirdly to the left now part of the poll targets drug is to help with this we can use this to orient the bone a little bit but this is far too severe to fix with just changing the position of the poll target so I'm going to go into edit mode and a quick inter press H to hide the poll target school it's a bit in my way and from front view I mean should grab this knee joint let me just zoom in here so I can get some finer control and by changing the position of the knee joint slightly we can greatly affect how the leg bends so if I just move this over this way a little bit and then hop into pose mode you can see it's still quite wrong but if I were to drag it over this way you can see it's an L bent in the other direction so I just want to make micro adjustments here and I can do that by holding down shift and dragging until it seems to be in roughly the right position and I can also bend it a little bit forwards from the side view and now we have a much nicer control of the leg so you can see it starts to bend once it gets past the pull target but by moving the pull target around you can point the knee so at this point the eye care system is working pretty well I'd say so I'm going to go back into edit mode and I want to unhide that pull target bone so alt H and will show up all right going back into pose mode I want to make it so that I can rotate the foot just by rotating the eye kabe own now currently the rotation of the foot depends on the lower leg bone see things that if I move this it sort of rotates along with the lower leg bone now I want to stop it from doing that so I'm going to select the foot bone and just go into the bone settings here and under the relations settings for the parent I'll say turn off inherit rotation so now as I move this around you can see that the bone remains perfectly level I'm then going to add in a bone constraint on the foot bone in much the same way that we did the IKEA constraint alpha select the IKEA bone shift select the foot bone and then shift control C and add in a copy rotation constraint all right the flip should turn green so let me select that and then go over into the bone constraints and I want to change the space to local with parent all right now let's see what happens as I rotate the IKEA bone it seems to be rotating correctly along the x-axis if it were rotating in the opposite direction which it may do in your case you can invert on the x-axis and then it will rotate in the other way let me try rotating this on the z-axis it's also working okay there once again you can use the invert options to make sure the things work as expected the bones are now all set up I want them so I just need to now copy the bones over from the left side onto the right side then if I select everything those here in pose mode and just press alt R and og to clear the rotation and location of the bones a Len press tab to go into edit mode and I want to select all of the bones on the left hand side the characters left hand side that is so I'll go into wireframe mode and I'll use my box select tool to just select all of these down here now for this step I need the 3d cursor to be properly centered so I'm going to press shift C to make sure that that's the case and then I'm going to press shift D to duplicate all of these bones and with them duplicated I'm going to right click which just cancels their movement but they're still duplicated here now note that the current pivot point is over here so if I were to rotate or scale these that all move towards that point now I want to change that point to be at the 3d cursor and we can do this by pressing the period key or the full-stop key whatever you want to call it so now if I scale this it all scales towards there if I lock the scale to the x-axis however by pressing X it will now scale over on to the other side like so now I want to scale it exactly negative one along the x axis so I can just type that in negative one and then press Enter with all of these bones still selected I need to go into the armature menu here and I need to choose the flip names option now when I press that they'll be able to see that going onto these bones now into the bone settings the name has changed to shoulder dot R so you can see it recognized I'll convened of naming the ones on the left side dot L and it's converted that to dot R on the other side okay now one thing that I'm noticing is that some of the bone that we copied over on to the other side here have got slightly different roll angles for example the shoulder bone here is rolled slightly differently to the corresponding shoulder bone on the other side and another good example is this lower arm bone here compared to this one and if you're wondering why this is a problem well recall how earlier I was talking about how useful it is to be able to copy a pose from one side of the character and paste it over onto the other side of the character well if the bone roles are different then that's not going to be very accurate for example if I just switch into pose mode and start setting up a pose until rotating around the 3d cursor let me just press comma to switch back to the normal pivot mode I'll set up to stay very simple pose here with this one arm and I'll select all of these bones ctrl C and then shift ctrl V to paste the flipped pose in other words to paste it onto the other side and alternatively the buttons for that are copy and paste flipped down here and we can see that the pose on the right side of the character is a little bit different and the slight discrepancy is purely due to the ear bone role so I'm going to select all the bones of our to reset the rotation and I'm going to go into edit mode here and with all of the bones selected I'm once again going to press ctrl n to bring up the recalculate role menu and I'm just going to align these only view access and star you can see that the role of the bones on this side of the character is consistent with the role of the bones on the other side so if you were to repeat that pose flipping experiment should see that it works correctly now all right so the rig is now done we just need to make is that when we pose the bones the mesh actually follows along with it so to do this let's go into object modes that I can select the character model and then shift right-click on the bones to select those and press ctrl P to bring up the parent options and as long as you first selected the character and then the bones you should have all of these armature deform options and we're going to choose parent with automatic weights now if I select the bones press ctrl tab to go into pose mode the mesh should actually follow along as I move the bones around so that's exciting we can see that with the automatic waiting some areas have worked better than others so if I try lift the shoulder up you can see that a little bit too much of the side of the body is maybe being lifted up with it and these are the sorts of things that we can tweak with weight painting and that's what we're going to be looking into in the next episode so until then Cheers

Channel: Sebastian Lague

Views: 350,168

Keywords: Blender (Software), rig, blender tutorial, character creation, low poly, low poly game characters, game model, unity3d, game development, videogame, rigging, skeleton, armature, ik rig, inverse kinematics, fk rig, forward kinematics

Id: jp_SqjB0468

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2017