Simple Rigging In Blender

so you want to rig something well you've come to the right place rigging is a subject that can seem daunting and slow but i'd like to show you the essentials of creating a really useful simple rig in blender okay first of all we need something to rig luckily i've been creating this t-rex model in some of my other videos oh it's gonna be nice to finally rig this when you're raking creatures and organic things in general usually good topology is essential this t-rex has pretty decent topology already you can see how i created the topology for the t-rex in my video on sculpting dinosaurs in blender all rigs in blender starts with an armature so we will open the add menu and add an armature to the scene when making rigs i always like starting at the hips that is usually where everything originates from including movement then in edit mode we can start extruding bones out into a spine i like to make one big bone for the chest because the ribcage makes everything a lot more rigid so one bone is enough more bones up along the neck a head bone and a bone for the jaw make sure to place these bones where you want the rotation to be jaws follow the head so you can parent the jaw underneath the head bone then i will jump to the hip and extrude out tail bones so that they are parented underneath the hip itself also rigging is all about naming so start naming your bones early it will make your life a lot easier and use the blender naming convention okay now it's time for the limbs so from the hip i will extrude a little extension bone to the root of the thigh bone and then extrude the leg bones from there now the hip technically only needs one bone but i like to have all my bones connected this generally works better for games so keep that in mind when building and using your rig that sometimes you have bones that are not meant for deforming the mesh itself then i can extrude some bones for the toes and some for the arms as well and remember to make a bone for the shoulder i see many people forget this your arm technically has three segments if you include the shoulder blade as well and it gives much nicer and more organic deformation when making all the bones on the side here it is important that you name them with the side label like for this arm i'm labeling it with a dot l to let blender know that this is a left side bone and i'll also create some simple bones for the eyes and pairing them underneath the head bone with an offset alright with that done we gotta make sure our bone orientation is correct so that they rotate consistently during animation to see the orientation more clearly we can head over to the armature properties and turn on axis now we can hit shift n to recalculate the bone roll usually a bit of trial and error to see what gives the best result but the global plus y axis gave me a nice result because it kept the local x-axis aligned with the world x-axis which is how i like it with that done it's time to mirror the bones to the other side this is where the naming convention is important grab all the bones go to armature and hit symmetrize now blender has mirrored all the bones to the other side and it renames all the bones with an l to an r instead neat then we can jump into post mode to test out the rig personally i really like to select all the bones and copy the transforms using ctrl c then pressing ctrl shift v to paste the inverted post if you've done it all correctly it should result in a perfect mirror also a handy tip for animation and now we can actually skin the model which is super simple first select the model in object mode then the rig and hit ctrl p and choose armature deform with automatic weights and now our mesh has been skinned to the armature so we can move the bones and boom we got a rigged creature but there's always room for improvement like on the jaw i made the bones aren't quite right and the skinning could be a little bit better the cool thing is that in blender you can always just go into edit mode on the armature and edit the bones and readjust without breaking the connection to the mesh awesome something we also need to adjust is the weight painting for our model what we can do here is jump to edit and turn off lock object mode now you can select your armature in post mode and then select your mesh in weight paint mode this way you can jump between the bones by control clicking on them and it will adjust which bone you're weight painting on and then it's pretty much just about readjusting the skinning here and there i was left with a pretty good result from the automatic so not much is needed here and make sure to test your rig along the way to see if you get good skinning with this getting done we can move on to setting up some inverse kinematics ik for short create a new bone not parented to anything we will call this bone leg ik place this bone on the foot then duplicate it and move it up to the knee this will be our pole target for our ik next choose the bone right before the ik bone and then attach an inverse kinematics constraint to it under bone constraints select the leg ik as the target and the pole target as the pole target and then set the chain length to the number of bones that the ik should affect for me it is three for a human leg it would be two if your leg happens to be rotated you can simply adjust the rotation on the ik constraint and boom looks great and then all you have to do now is just hit symmetrize again to bring all the ik to the other leg as well and then you can pretty much start playing around with your model and there we have a pretty basic brick and you can always do more one thing that is pretty nice though to add is controls which is super simple and fast to do in blender let's add a mesh circle to our scene and put it into a collection then in post mode on your armature select a bone then head over to the viewport display then under custom shape select your circle to be your custom object now it transforms the bone into the circle cool and if it's a bit too big you can adjust the scale of the shape and now this should be a lot nicer to grab during animation then we can just add custom shapes to all the bones and if you want to add shapes to multiple bones at once select a bunch of bones and then hold down alt while selecting your custom shape then it applies the change to everything selected i like adding cubes for ik parts on the rig it just keeps it clear looks awesome but there's one little problem all the controls are black it would be nice if they popped a bit more and we can do that with bone groups head over to the armature properties then under bone groups we will create a new bone group mark it red and call it right then i will select all the bones on the right side and hit assign they have now all turned red awesome then i will make the group for the left side as well mark it blue and assign it again i also marked the middle yellow these are the colors that i always use and it's pretty standard and that's pretty much it now we can start posing our model i also created some extra features like an ik for the head and chest and a few other tweaks but hopefully now rigging is a bit less daunting and it is super rewarding when it is done because now you can start actually animating your model but that's for another video if you wish to learn more and see the full creation process of the t-rex including sculpting texturing rigging and much more check out the creating dinosaurs and blender process over on gumroad or if you wish to get access to the t-rex model itself fully textured and rigged ready for games and films you can check that out as well over on gumroad well that's pretty much it for now thanks for watching and see you in the next one

Channel: Critical Giants

Views: 180,022

Keywords: blender, art, conceptart, tutorial, worldbuilding, film, game development, concept, rigging, controls, armature, character, animation, creature, dinosaur, trex

Id: EVBseo4YLa4

Length: 7min 6sec (426 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021