Simple Character Rigging in Moho | Moho Pro 13 Tutorial

hey how's it going this is mccoy buck and in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to create a simple rigged character now this tutorial will be perfect for you if you're just learning how to rig or maybe you have a little bit of experience in moho but you're still not quite understanding the rigging process this video is going to be perfect for you i've been doing a lot of one-on-one mentoring lately with a lot of the users of the software and a lot of beginners this is going to be using the same process with a lot of those that i have taught so the character that you see here on my screen is the same one that i use when mentoring or if you want to use your own character that's totally fine too this is just a simple rig that hopefully will be able to help you all right if you got the rig downloaded and you have it open let's go ahead and get started so i want to go over real quick how this rig is broken down so in your layers panel menu over here you can see that he has a head a front arm his torso his front leg pelvis back leg and his back arm so it's a really simple character there's no hands shoes feet anything like that face i just wanted to make this as simple as possible for you now something that's important to notice is the tools how they're dynamically changing on the left hand side of the screen depending on what layer you're selecting so if i select the layer right here this is the vector layer has that little bean symbol there that lets me know that i'm on the vector layer that is different than the bone group layer so the bone group layer is what's going to give me the accessibility to the bone tools to be able to create the rig so if you're following along with your own rig or your own character make sure you go into the new layer and you go down to this drop down and select bone and then all the vector layers or if you're even using images that you created your character with go ahead and drag all those layers into that bone group layer so that you can start rigging all right now with the bone layer selected go to the left hand side and select the add bone tool it's going to be this bone plus icon here and the keyboard shortcut for that is a now i won't be using any keyboard shortcuts though i highly recommend using keyboard shortcuts to speed up your your rigging process but i'll be clicking on the individual tools so you can see exactly what they are where they're located and make it easier to follow along now you can see when i'm selecting the different tools that i'm having these tool settings up here change dynamically as well and if you look here underneath of that tool settings option you can see that there's some tool tips regarding that tool one of them that we're going to be using is the shift key so if i hold down shift and i left click and i drag up it's going to constrain that bone perfectly either vertically or horizontally now you can see after i have drawn out my bone i have some new tool options that have become available to me one that i'm going to use to show you how the bone works is the transform bone tool now the transform bone tool selected you can see that i have these two nodes here on my bone this top one lets me scale my bone up and down so if i need to change the scale of my bone while rigging i could use that tool and then i have this bottom one here that lets me move my bone around we're gonna be using this tool in order to perfect our rig and put our bones exactly where we want them when we go to test out the rig and fix any issues that we have with it now outside of those two nodes you can see that my cursor has this circular arrow this lets me rotate the bone and this is one thing i want you to keep in mind when placing your bones for this character here he has arms and he has legs so he has elbows and he has knees so i want to place that rotation as close as possible to those joints and right off the bat you're not going to know where those joints are so i'm going to show you how you can move those bones around to match where those joints are going to be then i'll show you a setting that lets you see on your layers where the points are when you're actually placing your bones so let's go ahead and get started the first bone that we're going to create is called the root bone i'll explain more how that works right now but just place that root bone somewhere along this belt line and towards the middle of the character so right here i'm holding i'm going to hold down shift and then i'm going to left click and i'm going to drag towards the left there and as you can see there that's my root bone so this bone is currently highlighted which lets me know that it's going to be the parent bone to any other bone that i draw after i'll explain more what that means but just make sure that this is highlighted when you go to create your next bone because the next bone is going to be the child of this parent bone so with that bone highlighted go here towards the tip of this bone and we're going to do the same thing we're going to left click and we're going to drag up towards the top of his torso there now i didn't add more than one bone in this case because i'm not going to be creating a bend for this character again i'm going to make it as simple as possible for you but let's say you want to create a bend in his back you would need at least two bones in order to create that bend the next bone that we're going to create is the head bone and again remember where the rotation is at for that bone that is important so i want the rotation to be at the bottom of his head here so i'm going to place the bone at the bottom of his head and again i made sure that that previous bone was highlighted and then i drew my new bone okay so now that we have the head bone drawn i want to draw out the arm bones however i don't want to parent my arm bones to the head bone because that's not how our anatomy works the arm bone is connected towards the torso so in order to select the torso using this same add bones tool there's a tool tip if we hold down alt on the keyboard that gives us the ability to select the bone so i'm going to hold alt on the torso and i'm going to left click and that's going to highlight that torso now making that the parent so now this so now this bone is going to be parent of two different bones at the moment it's going to be a parent of the head bone and of this arm bone that i'm going to create so come here towards the center of this shoulder right here and let's do the same thing we're going to hold down shift and we're going to left click and drag so now we're going to connect the next bone approximately where i think the elbow is going to be and doing the same thing i'm going to hold down shift i'm going to left click and i'm going to drag so now let's do the same thing i want to create my back arm bones but as you can see here the parent that's currently selected is this forearm so i don't want to have that as the parent i want to select the torso again so now the torso is going to be a parent of three bones so it's going to be for the head and now it's going to be for both sides of the arms so let's go ahead and let's drag out our next set of bones for the arm and now we're going to work on the legs so in this case the root bone is going to be the bone that's going to move all bones so all bones that connect back to the root bone in this case the head back to the torso back to the root bone the same for the arms back to the torso back to the root bone we want to do the same thing for the legs we don't want to connect the legs to the torso we want to connect them back to the root bone so holding down alt and left clicking highlight that root bone and then let's draw out our next set of bones for our legs so i'm going to start up here towards the top of the upper leg here and i'm going to hold down shift and i'm going to drag down again approximately where i think the knee is i'm probably really off but we'll fix that later and then the same thing i'm going to hold down shift and i'm going to drag down hold down alt left click select that root bone and then the same thing holding down shift left click and drag left click and drag so try to have those two bones as similar as you can if not that's okay again we're going to be fixing all of this so now what i want you to do is start testing these bones and see how it works and see how the artwork reacts to these bones so to test you to come up here to your bone tools panel and you're going to select the manipulate bones tool which is z on the keyboard now to move any of your bones around you're just going to left click in the general area of where the bone is and just drag it around see how when i select the forearm that the rest of the arm is moving don't really worry about the artwork as far as how the artwork is reacting we're going to be able to fix all of that but right now i just want you to just move around the character and just test and see how this character moves or maybe you can even hide if you come over here to the eyeball icon on the right hand side of your layers panel here and you click on that you can see how the bones are moving now check this out when i move the torso you can see that it's moving the arms and the head and remember it's because the torso is the parent if i move the head it's not apparent of anything it's the child of the torso bone so the head moves by itself same thing with the arms and then if we come down here to the legs the legs just like the arms move by themself so there's a couple of cool things that's happening right now as we're moving these bones around one of them is what's called inverse kinematics and i know that word sounds big but basically means as we're moving this lower arm bone that's a child of this upper arm bone it's affecting that upper arm bone and when we move this leg the bottom of this lower leg it's moving the upper leg bone when using bones there's two ways that you can animate your character one is with inverse kinematics like we're showing here and one is with forward kinematics which means that you move the parent going forward so for an example if i was to move this arm this is an example of forward kinematics it's the parent moving the child but if i was to move the child bone it would only move the forearm and what i'm using is another keyboard shortcut for my manipulate bones tool as you can see here if i hold down alt go ahead and test that yourself but that rotates a single bone and this can come in handy it depends on what you want to do with your animation but i find that i have a lot of control with both of these methods both the inverse kinematics and with the forward kinematics so right now we are on frame zero which gives us the ability to test all our bones without affecting the actual character or the animation because as soon as we select one of the other tools you can see it snaps back once we're outside of that manipulate bones so now that you've moved around the bones and you can see how the bones react according to that parent to child relationship that we created i want to show you exactly what that looks like if we come here to the bone tool panel you can see that there's this tool here called the reparent bone tool go ahead and select that now this is showing exactly how that parent-to-child relationship is working see how all the bones are eventually going back to the root bone actually let's click on the root bone if i select the root bone you can see that it's moving all the bones the bone itself doesn't move it moves all the bones because all the bones are connected back to it so all of the rotation and the translation is going to move all of the bones with that root bone and that's going to come in real handy when it comes to animating your character and moving him around so going back to my repair and bone tool you can see that all those bones are going back to that root bone now for whatever reason if your parenting doesn't look the same as mine let's say you accidentally had your hand selected last and then it was parented to your arm so when you were testing out your rig you were seeing that it had some really funky results well you can fix that and the bone reparenting again it has its tips right here so if i wanted to fix this and make this lower leg bone the child of this upper leg bone parent to fix that i would use this tool tip that it shows here i'm going to hold down alt and left click on the bone you can see it highlights that bone that was parented to the the lower arm with that bone highlighted i'm now going to left click on the upper bone and you can see that just like the right leg it's showing that that bone is parented to that upper leg now if i wanted to remove the parenting altogether while it's highlighted i would click off of the character and you can see that it removes the parenting completely so i don't want that so i want to make sure while this is highlighted i select the upper bone and then to deselect you can hit escape on your keyboard now the other thing that i want to show is the bone strength so if you go over to the bone strength tool you can see that there's the semi transparent ovals and this represents the bone strength anything that is near or inside this transparent circle of this bone strength is going to have influence on the artwork so going back to my manipulates bone tool if i move the arm you can see it's moving the head and if i move the leg it's moving the torso and we don't want that so a good rule of thumb when it comes to bone strength is you want your bone strength to be basically the same size of the area that it's covering so in case of the arm i'm going to left click on that bone that has that bone strength and i'm going to drag towards the left and i'm just going to shrink that down to about the same size the arm and i'll do the same side for this arm so i'll do the same thing to this side of the arm for the head i want to lower that to around this size here same thing for the torso it doesn't need to be that much so i can lower that as well for the root bone you actually don't want any bone strength because the root bone is not going to be manipulating or moving any of the arms it's going to be moving the entire character so if you take a look up here at the bone strength tool settings i have this value of 1 and watch what happens to that number as i decrease it you can see it becomes smaller and we want that to be zero so i'm going to left click and drag all the way to zero sometimes it doesn't do that perfectly so if you need to just edit that numerical value just put zero and hit enter and that'll also bring that bone strength down to zero and then for the legs i'm gonna do the same thing i'm just gonna lower that bone strength on those legs and there you go as far as the bone strength that we just lowered we still might need to test and manipulate and work with it in order to improve our rig but for now go ahead and test out your rig again so go to your manipulate bones tool and just start moving stuff around and see if you see any difference in terms of the results and you might not again the legs still affect one another even though that bone strength is inside of their own artwork we now need to tell the software what specific layers we want those bones to have influence over so now we're going to get into what's called bone binding so let's start with the head first click on the head layer then click on the bone with the head layer selected you can actually click on the bone as you can see there i'm just left clicking and you can see that on the vector layers i actually do have tools for the bone i have the select bone tool and then i have a few others i have manipulate bones so you can actually manipulate the bones here in the vector layer which is kind of handy but right now we just want to select that bone the bone binding method that we're going to use for this character is called flexi binding this is actually one of the most popular and one of the most easiest ones to wrap your head around if you're just starting with rigging so to bind this bone to this head layer go up to the bone menu drop that down and select use selected bones for flexi binding again get in the habit of using keyboard shortcuts the keyboard shortcut for this is ctrl shift f and now we're gonna do the same we're just gonna go down the layer here and we're gonna select the front arm now to select multiple bones you're gonna hold down shift while you have the select bone tool selected and then click again go up to the bone menu and then use selected bones for flexi binding okay so let's go down to the next layer so we're going to select our torso so the torso like i said it could have multiple bounds but in this case we just have the one bone so just select the one go to bone use selected bones for flexi binding all right now that we have the torso go to the front leg select both bones using shift go to the bone menu use selected buns for flexi binding now for the pelvis this depends on how you want to rig your character do i want to move the pelvis with the torso or do i want the torso or do i want the pelvis to stay stationary and bind it to the root bone which also stays stationary or do i want to create a bone specifically for the pelvis now that's up to you because it all has different effects but in this case let's try and see if we can bind the pelvis with this bone now like i said your rotation really matters as far as where your bone is placed so i can actually have multiple layers bound to one bone but in this case it might not work perfectly so we'll probably have to fix some things in order to get this to work right so let's take the risk and let's go ahead and bind the pelvis to the torso bone now we have the back leg which you've already seen and you can see that i just made a mistake there and that's good that that just happened because now you can see that i actually bound that incorrectly so i still had the torso bone selected along with my leg bone when i was binding that leg bone so now watch what happens when i manipulate this nothing okay so that's not what i was expecting however i don't want to have my uh these two bones bound to one another for this layer i'm actually kind of confused as to why that's not showing any sort of result there i might have be having a brain fart right now but to unbind a a bone that you bound by accident let me go back to the pelvis so the pelvis is still connected and the torso is still connected okay that was weird all right so to unbind the bone what i'm going to do is i'm just going to reselect those two bones and then i'm going to go to my bone uh use selected bones for flexibinding once again and you can see with those only those two bones selected and not that other bone it it changed the it updated the binding to the correct binding okay so if that ever happens just remember that you can just reselect those bones that you only want to be bound to that layer and then go back and bind those once more and then for the back arm i'm gonna go ahead and select those two bones same for the front arm and bind those okay so now everything should be bound to their specific layer so let's go ahead and test this so i'm going to go back to my main bone layer and i'm going to use the manipulate bones tool and again technically i could use the manipulate bones tool on the specific layers but for me it's just habit to go back to the bone layer and i'm going to start moving things around so check that out the head is no longer affecting anything else because now the bone knows exactly which layer it should be influencing check the arm arm looks good that other arm looks good the torso looks good oh and you can see there as far as that that pivot on those hips that's not too bad i was expecting that to be a little bit worse but that actually works pretty good and then the legs legs look good they're not affecting anything else now when i say it looks good obviously there's some distortion there you take a look at the arm his arms getting skinny when it bends what's that about we want to fix that and that's what we're going to go over in future videos we're going to clean all this up using smart bones but for right now let's see if we can with this testing that we're doing let's see if we can get this to work a little bit better just using the bone strength you first want to set everything up as best you can using bone strength before you move to smart bones because smart bones even though it's very powerful it could also really put you in the weeds if you're not careful so let's go back to just one of these bones let's move just this left front bone here and i'm going to do so using forward kinematics so i'm not going to use it with inverse kinematics i just want to use forward kinematics to see how this bone moves so i'm going to hold down alt and i'm going to move this bone up okay so we can see right away that this is shrinking because the influence of this forearm is actually overpowering the influence of this upper arm and that happens when you have two bones that are really close together and we're using flexi binding the software is doing its best to try to determine which part of the artwork these bones are affecting when they're on the same layer so let's try to help it out a bit by lowering the strength of this lower arm so if i go to the bone strength tool and i lower that you can see that it's starting to come back but now look what happens when i remove the strength completely the artwork no longer has anything to grab the the bone no longer has anything to grab onto it doesn't have any influence when i lower it to zero so this would definitely need some smart bones if i increase the bone strength here you can see it's kind of affecting this lower arm but what one thing that you want to completely avoid is this you don't want to have the parents being completely overpowered by the child so if i was to raise this strength up a lot you do not want that because when it comes to smart bones and trying to fix this mistake this is just going to give you a headache it's going to make things 10 times more complicated than it should be so as far as this upper arm and any of the parents you want this to be distorted the least amount possible you don't want this to have any effect based off of the the children bones so let's go ahead and let's lower that strength once again so again unless we're at zero this is pretty much what we're getting right here let's see if we can increase the the strength here a little bit if the lower arm like that is being distorted that's that's not a big of a problem so again i'm going to use the manipulate bones tool and hold down alt and move that around again in the arm there's not really much i can do there unless i fix that in smart bones but i'm looking at his his sleeve here i really don't want a lot of movement in that sleeve but when it becomes when it comes to the animation and it moving around it's not as noticeable so let's take a look at the other arm we're probably going to have the exact same result yep have the same result there so again let's let's lower the strength so that there's still influence on that lower arm but there's less on that on that uh the upper arm there okay something i didn't really look at before is how the arm is moving completely up i actually don't want that either and i think that might be unavoidable yeah that looks like it's unavoidable unfortunately i'll try to increase the strength a little bit more in that arm decrease it and the lower arm getting my keyboard shortcuts confused here sorry i said i wouldn't use keyboard shortcuts but i'm trying to do this quickly but still i'm just using the bone strength to adjust and the the manipulate bones tool but i'm just switching between uh s and z on the keyboard yeah so that's that's not good let's try this one again yeah see i want something like that okay and that's looking a little bit better a little bit less movement on that on that sleeve there i'm looking at a couple things there's the sleeve and then there's the the arm itself but the arm we're just gonna have to fix that in smart bones but like i said you just want the least amount of possible movement on that parent to make smart bones a lot more easier all right let's take a look at the legs or rather the torso that torso is next oh yeah the torso is pretty good we're sitting pretty right there so if your torso and i'll i'll go over this just in case your bone placement is a little off compared to mine if if you rotate your torso and it's not as smooth as yours that's totally okay i'm probably not gonna be able to get this result again just eyeballing it because i have this pivot point ever so slightly or ever so precise inside of this inside of this round area of this pelvis that it almost looks like you can see it kind of rotates offset it offsets on the one side versus the other but it almost works perfectly and as far as that rotation and yours might not it all depends on just how you rig it but i'll show you we'll we'll go through and we'll fix all this i'll show you how we can fix all that and then let's go to the legs here so then we got the legs okay so again we got a lot of influence here in that lower leg and that upper leg when we move the lower leg so let's lower the strength a little bit see if we can get some of that influence off of that leg now i again i don't want to go too low because now that's distorting really bad that artwork and again just going to give me more work so something like that i guess that'll work so we have quite a bit to work with there let's go to the other leg and again i'm using forward kinematics i i'm doing kind of a bad job right now it's saying what i'm doing but i'm using alt my keyboard with the manipulate bones tool and i'm manipulating these bones and i'm going to lower the strength so again all this is trial and error if i was to show me going back and forth to these tools this would be a really long tutorial okay and i think that looks pretty good so that's where we'll leave this video right now if if you got this far awesome job especially if this is your first rig i know it's not a very easy thing to to do it's kind of complicated uh i i totally get that i struggled with this a lot when i first was learning how to rig and i really hope this is helpful for you if it is let me know in the comments let me know if there's something i didn't cover quite right and i maybe need to go back to in another video and focus specifically on that but that's it for this video if it's helped you please leave a like on the video and subscribe if you're new if you want more tutorials this is what i love to do also i want to shout my friend out eric who uh inspired me to make this tutorial he's got one very similar and probably much more simpler than this one i'm gonna leave a link to his video down in the description it's to show you how to create a simple stickman rig and again i think it'll be really helpful to beginners but that's all for now i will see you later

Channel: McCoy Buck

Views: 39,804

Keywords: Moho, anime studio, Rigging, Tutorial, Animation, Character Animation, Character Rigging, character rig, moho pro 13, moho pro, madewithmoho

Id: 0XUYFqnKLBc

Length: 27min 24sec (1644 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021