Tentacle rigging in Blender - Complex rig for complex animation

hi everyone this is pierre from p2 design last week i made a breakdown video of noira's last trailer featuring the crack queen kalinga in this video i will show you how we made this complex rig funnel around and i will also break down the tentacle rigs of both the arms and the legs this is pretty tough so it could be hard to follow for rigging beginners let's dive in [Music] all our rigs are custom rigs it's more flexible for us to build our own rig than to use an automated solution like autoric pro or rigify the end result is pretty close to a rigidify rig with some feature variations since these are game rigs we don't use bendy modes to deform our characters as they are specific blender features that only works in blender our game models are pretty detailed as we also use them for marketing and cinematic and since we don't have to display 100 of them on screen the game engine can handle them easily this allows us to add enough bones on the face of our characters to build expressions there is no shape key involved in our characters the most expressive part of the face like the mouth or eyes feature a bone for one two three bound vertices i created a bundle of all the mouths so that the corner of the mouse will also move the controllers nearby it also behaves pretty naturally with the jaw controller on top of this we use a lot of action constraints to create mouth shapes and useful face poses like eye blink smiles or phroning this allows quick face pausing for gameplay animation that doesn't need super detailed face motion i always build a forward kinematic and inverse kinematic switch for the arms and the legs learn to better animate with them in this video and i also build a simple but versatile hendrick hand posing is super important to me in animation even when the characters are seen from afar the spine is almost the same as the one from rigify finally are your friend rig sockets for the weapons and gears says that we can attach them to the characters hands back our belt for example or decide to move them freely in space now that we've seen the general pictures of our regular rigs let's break down the tentacle rig if you want to create what i've shown in the beginning of the video i teach you everything in the art of effective rigging it's beginner friendly and the best place to start if you've never rigged before and it thoroughly covers the full creation of such a complex rig check it out on p2designacademy.com in this video we will focus on the legs tentacle ring as it's the most complex the arm rig or arm tentacle is a forward kinematic chain with master bones that controls up to three forward kinematic bones at once and the trigger controller pair bone to better shape the tentacles for the sake of demonstration i will just rig a three bone chain once you've extruded your bone make sure that they are all unparented by pressing alt p and clear parent the first thing we want to create are the tweaker bone to do so i will select all my bone press shift d to duplicate them and scale them down using individual origins it's very important to rename your bone along the way so i will press ctrl f2 to open the battery name panel i will replace the type from objects to bones and i will search for 0.001 and replace it by tweakers i'm missing one bone for the tip of the chain so i will simply extrude it and unparent it each main bone will be the children of the twicker bone bone a will be parented to bone a tweaker bone b will be parented to build b trigger etc when you have overlapping bones you can choose the one you want to select by left clicking and holding out hold shift to add more selection from there we need to apply a stretch to construct from the trigger bone to the previous main bone this has to be done in pose mode and then you can select the bones that will constraint the other then the ones that gonna be constant and press control shift to c and choose stretch two now whenever we move it to carbon the child bone will flow and the previous bone in the chain will also be stretched we now need to create our forward kinematic controllers to do so i will select all the tweaker bone switch back to edit mode and i will duplicate them and scale them up i can now rename them and now i simply need to parent the two carbon to the corresponding f k bone when a trigger becomes the child opponent afk when b tweaker becomes the child of bond b f k and for the tip of the chain both bone c tweakers are going to be the children of bone cfk and this is how you build a simple tweakable fk chain the tweakers influence the main chain and the tweakers are influenced by the fk chain now we do need our forward kinematic chain to be a forward kinematic chain and to do so we simply need to parent bone b fk to bone afk and bone cfk to bone bfk from there i advise you to give a custom shape to your different controllers bone and it's also recommended to assign them to different bones group it's gonna be easier for you to identify the different bones and their purpose if they have different shapes and different colors check out my video about custom bone shapes in blender it's time to get into the kneading really of the video with the advanced game ready tentacle rig if you're still holding strong to this tutorial please post a squid or an octopus in the comments below again for the sake of presentation i've just made a six spoon chain since the hierarchy is going to be a little more complex i will add a root boon and call it root then i will recreate the tweak urban mechanism as we did before give them all the custom shape and assign them to a bone group then each main bone is going to be a child of the corresponding twicker bone and each weaker bone will constraint the previous bone in the irr key with a stretch to constraint before we build our inverse kinematic chain we are going to need a chain in between when we previously built the forward kinematic chain we created a controller bone pair main bone but the benefit of an inverse kinematic is to be able to control multiple bone by moving the extremity of the inverse kinematic chain the idea here is to create a master bone for three main bone so i duplicated bone a and b and moved them to the side by 0.5 units i scale them and snap them so that they are the length of three consecutive bones and i will now give them the suffix mch for mechanism and b-bone since they are going to be b bonds i will clear their parenting and clear their constraint in pose mode by pressing ctrl alt c let's switch our armature display to b-bone and subdivide those two bone by six by going to the b bone section and under segment typing six in edit mode i will select the other bone and you can change their thickness by pressing ctrl alt s it does no influence on the rig but the way it is displayed if i parent b bond d to b one a and i bend it you can see that now we have some kind of smooth bending of the boats and what if this moose bending was influencing the twicker bones but before we do so we need to control this b-bone chain so what we will do is that we will create twicker bones for the b-bone chain and those three carbons of the b-bone chains are going to be manipulated or influenced by the inverse kinematic chain we are going to create right now you simply create the chain i will go back into edit mode duplicate those two main bones and offset them on the x-axis for the time being i will give them a relevant name remember that the bone d is parented to the bone a now i will parent the bone a inverse kinematic to the root bone i will then create a new bone at the tip of the chain clear its parenting so that it has no relation with the inverse kinematic chain and then i will create an inverse kinematic constraint on those two bones don't forget to set the length of your inverse kinematic chain to the number of bones involved in the chain in this case two bones and then in the bone properties i will allow the bones to stretch by setting their inverse kinematic stretching to a value of 0.01 remember that if you wanna use ik stretching you need to set this on all the bones of your inverse kinematic chain my inverse kinematic base mechanism is now set up so let's now create our stretching mechanism for the b bones by adding a stretch to constraint from the trigger bone to the previous b bone in the hierarchy we also need to parent b bond d to b bond d intermediate and b bond a to b bond a intermediate so now those temporary trigger bones control the chain of b bones so if we are able to manipulate those triggers with the inverse kinematic chain then the inverse kinematic chain is going to influence the b bond chain so let's parent our intermediate bone to the corresponding inverse kinematic bone both d tweaker are going to be the child of dmchik and the bone a trigger is going to be the child of bone a ik if we move the ik controller then the ik chain is moving and so does the b-bone chain it's a bit wonky because it's not aligned but it does work there's one issue we need to address regarding the inverse kinematic chain when we stretch it the bones get bigger they don't stretch properly to isolate the scaling we need to create intermediate bone so i will duplicate the trigger bone rename them since they were duplicated they are also parented to the corresponding bone on the inverse kinematic chain so whenever i'm pulling on the inverse kinematic chain they get scaled to a great way to prevent the scaling is to add a constraint a copy scale and we are going to copy the scaling of the root bone since the root bone is not scaled we are not using it those bone will stay at a scale of one from there i can parent the tweaker bone to those newly created bones so that they won't get scaled but they will follow the transformation of the inverse kinematic chain now you can see as i pull on the inverse kinematic controller my b bond chain is stretching so it's getting thinner as it gets longer don't give up we're almost done let's switch back to b-bone you can see that with all our manipulation we lose the benefit of the b-bones that don't bend anymore so we need to fix this i will copy the name of the boon on the top of the chain this way i won't have to search for its name i will then select the b-bone go into the b-bone option and i will set the end handle to tangent and paste the name of this bone and now you can see that my bendy bone is following the orientation of this bone so i can do the same for the start handle using the next bone in the chain and i will also use this bone as the end bone of the previous b-bone in the hierarchy so now whenever i move those two carbon our b bond will follow and as i rotate them it will also bend the b bonds but i can't scale them to change the curvature of the vivo so we need to fix this to do so i will switch back to octahedral i will select our temporary trigger bonds and i will duplicate them and scale them up so that we can clearly identify them these are going to be our current tweaker bones so i will rename them properly since those bones were created by duplicating the intermediate bone they are also following the inverse kinematic chain but beyond this for the time being they don't do anything they don't have any influence on our rig what i want is my intermediate bone that control the b bone to follow the location and rotation of those new trigger balls so i will use a copy location and copy rotation constraint from the trigger bone to the intermediate bones so now when i move those trigger bones the mch ent b-bone moves and so does the b bones but if i scale those two care bones nothing happen so we can use the scaling of those trigger to drive the curvature of the b boards to keep things clear i will move all the mch spoon onto another layer i will first add the main b bones and then select the mch intermediate bone press m and move them onto the layer number two so if i move my trigger on the side we can see the b bone spending and now in the bone property if i change the ease in and out i can change the curvature of the people to easily identify my trigger bone i will assign them to a bone group and set them to a red color i will also give them a custom shape a double sided arrow since i will be only using the y scaling of my tweaker bone i can lock the other channels to use the white scale as the driver i will right click on the y scale channel and choose copy as new driver then i can select the first speed bone and i want to draw the easing value so i will right click on it and i will choose paste driver as i do so you will see a slight shift in the burning of the b boards and this is because it's currently using the scaling of the bone which is one and not zero so i need to change the driver i will right click and choose edit driver switch to script expression and i want the current scale minus one so that by default it's going to be a value of zero when i scale it up it will increase the easing and if i scale it down it will reduce it to zero now i just need to repeat the process with the different trickle bone the trigger bone in the middle will influence the end of the b bone a and the beginning of the b bone d while a trigger will influence the beginning of b bone a and d trigger tip the tip of b-bone d this is the final step don't give up so now we need to influence our trigger bones in the very first chain the chain that is supposed to deform our character we need to create an intermediary chain of bones so that we can parent our trigger bone to it this intermediary chain will be influenced by the b bone and since our trigger bone will be children they will behave the same way but we will be able to manipulate them to do so i've selected all my trigger bone duplicated them and scaled them down and i just renamed them with the suffix mch and now i'm parenting the trigger bone to this newly created mch bone once done i will get rid of the custom shapes on those mch pods i will zoom on my amateur so that you can clearly see those tweaker mch what's very important is to make sure that they are parented to nothing they have no parent because we are going to use the armature constraint since the amateur constraint is a relationship constraint having a hierarchy on top of it will most certainly generate bugs a bit like the child of constraint i added an amateur constraint to the tweaker mch now i need to click add target bone to be able to assign it to a specific bone and i will use my b bone d using an armature con using an amateur constraint is like skinning the constraint bone to the target bone so i will give the same constraint to the trigger d e f then i will constraint bone a b c m c h to the b bone a and finally for the d tweaker m c h i will add an amateur constraint with an influence from both the b bond d and b bond a since it's right in the middle of those two boats the result is a bit funky because our chains are not aligned but you can see the curvature of the b-bones on our main chain finally to prevent any scaling issue i will add a copy scale constraint on each mch trigger bone from the root bone now the final step is to realign all the bones so all the chain that i have offset to have a better view of what i'm doing i will just select them in edit mode press g x and minus 0.5 to offset them on top of the original chain i will also give a custom shape to my root bone and to my inverse kinematic controller so that you have a better look at what we have done this is definitely a tough rig but it's very versatile and honestly this is what you need whenever you want to reach this level of quality in your animations reading is not about creating tons of functionalities it's about giving control to the animator and animating is not about emotion it's about life it's about getting strong poses and it's about crafting every of them this is the end of this video i hope you enjoyed it and i will see you very very soon [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Pierrick Picaut

Views: 79,457

Keywords: blender3D, modeling, shading, rigging, B3D, p2design, sculpting, digital, animation, cartooning, rendering, CYCLES, tutorial, Pierrick, Picaut, Pieriko, 3D, Computer, Graphic, blender, eevee, VIDEO GAME, rig, animate, stylised, best, Blender, art, digital art

Id: lBXFJA6UdaI

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Tue May 17 2022