Secrets of Mechanical Rigging in Blender | Tutorial | Artistly

while dealing with the animation of objects like robot arm or piston we need to define certain mechanics behind the movement and here is where the mechanical rigging came into play this video consists of basics of mechanical rigging followed by some examples well to start off in v4 press shift plus a and under the amateur option select single bone for adding the single bone now we can enter edit mode and press e to extrude this bone for increasing the chain length now we need to add a separate controller bone press shift plus s and select grab the cursor to the selected this will grab the cursor to the active point where we want the bone now simply press shift plus a to add the bone do note that we are in the edit mode while doing this the bone we just added is by default disconnected from the rest of the amateur hence it does not show any connection behavior with the rest we want this bone as a controller bone which will control the rest of the bone and this can be done using ik constraint for that enter the pose mode basically pose mode is where we define the keyframes for the animation and different kind of constraints and properties to the bone first select the controller bone then select the adjacent bone where the ik constraint will be applied simply press shift plus i and select the active bone option and this will add an ik constraint to it on clicking the ik bone we can see a yellow dotted line this means that the ik constraint effect starts from this point and it goes way back to the end to reduce this line till this bone enter the constraint tab and in the ik constraint property change the value of chain length this denotes how far the ik effect will go and that's how we use ik constraint now we will perform a mechanical rigging on piston first i model a low poly piston [Music] once that's done press shift a and add a bone on rotating it you may notice that some portion gets hidden by the geometry to make sure this won't happen in the object data property panel under waveform display check the in front option this will make the bone appear in the front then simply lay out the basic skeleton by extruding the bone at this point we want our controller bone press shift s and select cursor to select it to grab the cursor over there then press shift to c to add a independent bone now we want ik on this bone controlled by the below moon for applying the high key constraint select the controller boon and then select the constraint boom and press shift plus i to apply the constraint since these two bones are intended to perform vertical motion we need to lock the constraint for them select the below one and in the properties panel under ik animatics lock the x y and z axis the top bone will act as a buffer bone which basically means it will behaves as a spring for up and down motion of the piston hence for that we need to increase the ik stretch value all the way up to 1 and lock the ik along the 3 axis this gives us this kind of result then we simply add the bone at the center and then select the controller bone first and middle one next and press ctrl b to parent under these options select keep offset which basically means that the bone will be parented while maintaining the distance between them and now we can rotate the center one and we get this kind of result well before jumping on to parenting the geometry to the bone under edit mode uncheck the log object mode checkbox this means we can easily switch between different modes this will be clear in a bit for parenting first select the piston head and then hold shift and select the boom you may notice here that the mesh is selected in the object mode and the bone is selected in the pose node that's what unchecking the lock object does otherwise you have to select everything in the object mode and then go to the pose mode then manually select the bone and do all this kind of complicated stuff after selecting them press control p and under the option select boom to parent it do the same for the lower part of piston and capone and this gives us this kind of movement further i created more geometry for the vehicle this wheel will be linked to the center bone hence i parented it to that again add a bone at the top and parent the controller bone to it now when we move it we can observe the stretchy kind of behavior it is showing that's because this buffer bone is parented to the top one which results in making the ik constraint go all the way up to top hence we need to fix this by setting the chain length in the ik constraint tab and now when we move it everything works fine the reason behind adding this bone is we want to transform the linear motion of this bone to the rotational motion of the center bone for this select the center bone where we want the transformation to be applied then select the target amateur now we need to specify the source bone from where the transformation data comes which in this case is a top one on selecting it in the left half corner you may see the name of bone select this name in the bone input modifier and specify the value of map from and map2 the map form specifies the source data which is the top bone since i want to transform the x-axis motion i will change the value of mean and max for the x and let the other values to be 0. this data is mapped to the rotation of the center bone along the y-axis hence in the map to field set the value of y max as 360 and let other values to be zero the visors denote the axis where the change will occur from the source but since in this case we are moving the source along x axis we need to select x over here and finally on moving the top bone we get our desired transformation result this is the robot arm which we are going to read as we have did earlier just add the bone and execute them by pressing e then we need to add the controller bone by pressing shift plus a this will be our controller bone which of course will be disconnected from the rest of the bone now enter the pose mode and press shift plus i to apply the ik constraint to it now we need to add the bone for gripper on both sides with this we also add one more bone which will act as a controller of the gripper bone this means closing and opening of these grapes will be controlled by this bone also these two bones has to stay connected with the middle one so we need to parent them to it make sure you also parent the gripper bone to the grip for the purpose of controlling the gripper bone machine we will use transformation constraint select the effector bone and under constrain tab add the transformation constraint then select the target armature and also specify the target source bone which will control this in the map from fields we select the rotation data and set the value for the z-axis in the map2 fields we specify the z-coordinate as 180 degree and we got something like this we need to do the same for the other one but here in the map too we need to specify the value as negative as we want the movement in the opposite direction and that's how we get the gripper mechanics finally behind the remaining bone and we got our arm right as a quick tip in object data properties under weak foot display we can change the display format to various other formats like wire and string this is very helpful when the bone structure becomes more and more complex so these are some techniques of mechanical rigging in blender now it's your time to make something interesting out of it and tag me your result on my instagram handle finally if you found this video helpful and value adding make sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel also leave a comment if you want more such videos that's all for now thanks for watching see you in the next one

Channel: Artistly

Views: 13,135

Keywords: rigging, mechanical rigging, blender, tutorial, 3D

Id: MPQn488yOvM

Length: 7min 46sec (466 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021