The QUICKEST way to RIG your Characters! Blender 3D Tutorial

in this video I'm going to show you a super quick method for creating one of the most difficult joints on a character the hips hours of painful weight painting are far behind you as with some tiny additions to your character rig you can get some amazing defamations completely automatically I've been using this for all of my characters and I'm about to show you how you can too so here's an example character from miximo with the mocap animation the hip deformations here look fine but this is due to the perfected weight painting already on it so if we take the miximo character and unparent the mesh so they're no longer connected and we can go into the mesh vertex groups and delete them all so they are fully disconnected so this represents where you'd normally be with your separate character mesh ready to be connected to your Armature which shift select the mesh then the Armature Ctrl p and parent it with automatic weights so the two are now connected now as you can see the default deformations we get at the hips are not good it compresses the Torso when the legs move sideways and when they rotate forwards it rotates part of the body with it which do not translate well into animation so how do we fix this well normally this is where you'd need to go in and weight paint to fix it but for the hips it can be really difficult and time consuming because it's such a complex joint but we have a solution let's unparent and disconnect the mesh again for now select your Armature and go into edit mode at the top of one of the legs using the 3D cursor add a new bone with shift a and shrink it down and move it so it's inside the mesh we can see it all clear in wireframe mode then pressing e extrude vertically a longer bone then extrude a bone again a similar size to the first now in the front view we want to position these so the middle bone overlaps the leg bone we want the bottom bone to be the same angle as the leg and the top bone to stay vertical so it points up the body then adjust them left and right to create a sort of natural curve going from the leg up into the body these don't need to be exact and they can all be adjusted later we want to name these bones something like hip upper.l for the top bone for the middle hip dot L and the bottom bone hip lower dot L we add dot l so we can mirror this onto the right side two at the end currently this is a chain where each bone is parented to the next but we actually want to select the hip upper bone in edit mode hit alt p and clear the parent so it's no longer the child of this hip bone now in pose mode on the middle hip bone and the bone constraints add a stretch to constraint select the target to be the Armature and for the bone select the hip upper bone also take volume Min and Max at one now when we move the top and bottom Bones the middle hip bone automatically stretches between the two points now we want to go into the object data properties display as and select B bone this is how the bones are normally displayed on more complex rigs because of how versatile they are currently the bones are really thin so to change the display size of a bone select it and hit Ctrl alt s and you can scale how big it appears so here we can press a to select all maybe deselect the Hands by holding control and dragging over them and Ctrl alt s and drag to make them more visible and where you have overlapping bones such as hair you can vary the sizes to make each of them more visible when I have a setup like this I always make the end bone slightly bigger to Mark the end points now select the hip bone under bone properties and bendy bones we want to increase the segments to a higher number and as you can see here it creates the segments in the bone now scroll down further and for the start and end handle select tangent then select x z and ease for each and for the start handle choose the lower hip bone and for the end handle choose the upper hip bone now when you move the outer hip bones the Bendy bone in the middle curves with it finally for this part in edit mode select the lower hip bones then shift select the thigh bone hit Ctrl P keep offset to parent it then select the upper hip bone then shift select whatever hip or lower spine bone sits in the center alongside it and again with Ctrl p parent it one final thing is we'll only want the hip bendy bone to actually deform the mesh which can be controlled by this tick box so in the bone properties of the upper and lower bones untick this deform box now when we rotate the leg by the thigh bone the hip bone bends with it just a point to note if you readjust the base position of these bones in edit mode and you go into pose mode the hip bone can suddenly be out of place whenever this happens just go to the stretch constraint and hit this small cross which resets the original length now to flip this to the other side we can use symmeterize which is why we added the dot L at the end select the three hip bones under Armature hit symmetrize and it will copy the bones across now you may have an extra step depending on how your leg bones are named if the thigh bones are labeled the same with just dot L and Dot R then it should work but like on this miximo rig they aren't named this way so the bottom hip bone can't find a mirrored leg bone to parent itself to so in edit mode just re-parent the new lower hip bone to the right leg and it should all work fine and if you're using this with something like a miximo rig then don't change these leg names to try and fix it just re-parent it manually like I've done here so the naming system still works for transferring mocap animations now the final step is adding a new bone in edit mode snap the cursor to a point in the middle and add a bone remember use Ctrl alt s to make it bigger now scale and readjust the bone to where the legs join and we can label this something like hip center now add a bone constraint selecting the Armature we want to add three Target bones first is the hip or spine bone directly above it here I'll just copy across the bone name and we'll set this to one then add the two hip bones which are these two bones and set them each to 0.5 now this bone is a deform bone that is used to keep the mesh in the center in the right place so now if we rotate the legs this bone will always move to a center point between them now we've added three extra deform bones to our Armature so now if we connect it to our mesh in object mode select the character mesh shift select the Armature Ctrl P select Armature deform with automatic weights and now if we rotate the leg bones we get a much more natural looking hip deformation right out of the box and if we compare it to the version without these new Bones the Torso stays perfectly in shape and it's the same if you irritate the leg forwards the original had this strange thinning of the Torso whereas this torso stays the same and creates a much more natural crease remember this hasn't involved any weight painting at all so now you have a character that's much more ready to animate Straight Out of the Box depending on the design of the character you may need to make some adjustments to the positioning of the bones or you can do some weight painting on top but now you've got three extra bones to weight paint between making it so much easier to create the deformation so that work the cool thing about this too is it isn't a part of the actual chain of the leg meaning the animation works exactly the same if you select these bones press M and select one of these boxes you can actually hide them on a different layer so for example here's a miximo character with the new bones added and here's a mocap animation from miximo if I shift select the character Armature then the animation Armature go to object link transfer data link animation data it copies the animation keyframes across and as you can see it works completely normally and if we make this layer visible you can see the bones are there doing their job I actually found that sometimes it can provide even better deformations than just weight painting can achieve this character on the left is the default miximo wheat painting and the right is with the added bones and automatically assigned weights so no manual weight painting has been done here and you can see the deformations are no longer creating strange creases and can actually look better if you want to copy this onto other rigs in edit mode just select all of the new hip bones shift d to duplicate them and right click so they stay in place hit p and separate the bones now they are in a separate Armature you can snap this armatures to the same origin as the Armature you want to add it to shift select the Armature you're adding it to right click join here is disappeared but this is because it was on a different layer so we just need to make it visible in the bone layers and now in edit mode make sure to turn on X mirroring and you just need to move them into the right position parent the top hip bones to the spine and then make sure to turn off X mirroring before you parent the bottom hip bones to each individual leg in pose mode reset the original length of the stretch 2 constraint then for the middle bone in the Armature constraint remove the Armature and the bone and select the new Armature selecting the relevant spine bone and it should all be ready again just parent it with automatic weights and you have your character ready to go I really hope this helps I want to thank you all so much for all of the support you've given the channel recently we've just hit over 10 000 subscribers which is unbelievable I really cannot thank you enough thank you for watching this video Hit subscribe if you haven't already for more animation content and tutorials on the way and I will see you next time [Music]

Channel: Lewis Animation

Views: 131,653

Keywords: hips, rigging, rig, armature, blender tutorial, vfx, cgi

Id: Zx2LtlZqG3g

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023