This Tool Is Making Blender Better!

7 years ago a young 3D orain an animation artist embarked on a mission to make a blender tool that would go on to change How We Do regain an animation in fact at this point it is considered part of blender so what is this tool SL addon I'm talking about and how did his developer go from working on the most successful animation feature films such as minions and Despicable me3 to start his journey creating blender add-ons for for the community and what you should know about this if you are in animation using blender speaking about animation I recently wanted to up my product animation game you know those crispy modern product animations that you can see everywhere nowadays and this class by Derek Elliott was an awesome resource to learn from I feel like I understand the basics but what Derek offers in this class class is a workflow on how to combine all the knowledge into one awesome looping animation by the way if you are interested in learning more about animation skillshare is the place for you skillshare is the largest learning community on the web with thousands of classes led by industry Professionals in film illustration design freelance productivity and more and what I like more about skillshare is their recent learning pass Edition were you not can pick a class but also a learning path with multiple courses handpicked and curated specifically to help you achieve your goals so if you want for example to master modeling an animation in blender this learning path is a perfect pick for you you will go through all the major Milestones by learning modeling sculpting lighting and materials in addition to animation so the first 1,000 people to click the link in the description will get a one month free skill share premium membership which will allow you to access the entire library of learning paths and in addition to all their classes skillshare has been a big supporter of the channel for a long time so please help support the channel and pick a new skill by clicking the link in the description for those of you who don't know what it is auto R Pro is a blender tool that does exactly what its name suggests it serves as a way to breathe life into your 3D characters by providing a complete character rigging tool set rigging in computer Graphics is the idea of creating visual skeletons for a 3D model to be able to animate it by moving it around the difference is that this tool set is superior to the one found in vanilla blender which we'll go through in just a second before getting into the tool itself let's discover the wizard behind the magic auto rig was created by Luca AEL a talented animator and a developer from France he started his 3D graphics and art journey in his childhood and after finishing a bachelor's degree in Sciences he graduated from school in 2012 with a doctor's degree in CG film Direction and graduated later from the Goblins animation School in 2013 in character animation but how is this related to his addon you might ask well what this led to is Luca developing a unique set of skills between 3D animation and programming which pretty much led him to create one of the most advanced and most popular blender tools of all time while the tool has many features we can't cover them all we have for example smart features to automatically plays the bones on characters the retargeting of any Armature action to another one in addition to a game engine export feature Advanced facial setup with automated placement among many other features which we can discover more in detail in other videos but the question now is how did this add-on come to life so before the developer had his hands on blender he started his career by working with other 3D popular software that we all know such as Max and Maya which he learned in 3D art school and for job opportunities after he started discovering the world of blender he started to notice the fundamental riging issues with the software in his own words I've always liked to explore the full spectrum of read the art for modeling scripting riging to rendering but I started my career in the animation industry by animating characters for feature films such as minions and Despicable My3 I've learned a lot during these years each tiny controller of a character rig is important to fine-tune every detail of the pose meanwhile I was creating characters in blender and I was Ring them manually I started to write scripts to automate a few tasks then progressively wrote a full add-on with only three buttons back then following that event he started to receive requests from the community to release the add-on publicly and the fact that there was no rigging add-on that complied with game engines at the time the first version of the add-on was developed within a few months as a solo project which started approximately around 7 years ago and has been updated constantly ever since but where does it stand right now when it comes to the tools of the add-on itself there are many aspect that make it better but to get to the bottom of it comparing it to blender's manual rigging system is like day and night look I'm not saying that blender is a bad software but as far as rigging goes it still has a long way to go compared to some industry standard software as we see through many complaints of 3D artists online such as this one who stated I think my problem is that I feel like rigging and white painting in blender make the simplest things feel like more of a pain I took three modeling classes in school a few years back but we used Maya I actually loved riging in Maya but then I switched to blender recently and it just doesn't seem to flow how I would like it to do the enti ring workflow in blender is by manually placing Bones on your 3D models and to perform operations such as ik FK or shape Keys we would have to go back and forth in never in the Cycles through the various blender menus which is anything but enjoyable if you ask me to address this issue all R Pro in way automates many of the rigging aspects of the software for example similar to the mixam website we can place and drag circles on the joints of humanoid characters to automatically generate a rig as for non-humanoid characters it's not possible for them to be rigged with these smart features because they come in all shapes and forms and it is tricky to to build an automatic system that works for all of them but it is always possible to manually rig them with the add-on based on that we can call it a non-destructive workflow in other words the rig is easily editable in any given point after each creation besides the rig can also be further customized through the side menu of the tool such as the ability to add fingers wings or tails in addition to other stuff as well as a Kill lyph feature to rig the likes of dresses and skirts but this is not everything the ano just keeps offering more features such as full facial rigs secondary controllers and rig layers to store the different aspects of the rig in different layers for example facial bones in one layer and fingers in the other but honestly we are still just touching the tip of the iceberg here and there are way too many features that come with the add-on which we can't cover all in this video unfortunately so you can check the add-ons page for more details links in the description now making and sustaining an add-on of this caliber was not a walk in the park I mean after all a big part of the community relies on it and in my opinion I would say it even became part of blender's identity however as they say with great power comes great responsibility so behind the scenes there is a darker side especially for someone like this veler who's just doing it as a part-time job just like he said add-on development is a part-time job for me it also provides support to users via email and videos and I have other projects on the go I rig for Animation Studios and a game project it has been constant work and Improvement since then it was never easy although it is a passion project it can be very rough sometimes a new blender update will break half of your code and you have to refactor it all spend hours to solve math problems or debug something sometimes users can be very harsh and degrate your work and even you personally for no real reason but most of the users are very nice fortunately receiving positive feedback is always appreciated it helps me to keep moving forward the fascinating part is that he further revealed his unique approach to programming adal like this one well it is successful for a reason after all he starts his process by doing non-programmer tasks since coding add-ons is what he referred to as high level code So to avoid pointlessly coding something that may not even work he first tries to figure out how it can be done manually in blender after that he may also draw geometrical figures on a piece of paper since a large part of this code relies on visual elements I mean it is computer Graphics after all these methods help him clarify what he needs to code and automate and to W down complex abstract ideas into simple processes then he tries to figure out how to translate that into an interface with buttons and settings that function to finally start typing instructions at the end so as we said before this addon is one of the most popular blender add-ons of all time but it wasn't expected to happen just like like how Lucas said the success of AO rig Pro was not expected at all it really started as a hobby project and blender Market gave me the opportunity to publish it with simple tools and as the sales were increasing over time I spent more and more time on it and while I believe blender has a long way to go in reain to compete with other software such as Maya we can't deny that a pro took major leaps to make the rain experience in blender way better I hope you guys found this video useful and informative if you have something to add please leave it in the comment section below also if you're are new please subscribe to this channel to receive more videos like this thank you guys very much for watching and I will see you in the next one

Channel: InspirationTuts

Views: 17,657

Keywords: 3D rigging, animation tool, Blender add-on, character rigging, virtual skeleton, automated rigging, animation workflow, rigging automation, facial rigging, rig customization, rigging features, Blender development, animation industry, Lucas Veber, Auto-Rig Pro, Blender Market, rigging challenges, rigging improvement, rigging tools, rigging community, 3D modeling, character animation, rigging scripts, Blender rigging, rigging techniques, rigging advancements.

Id: R1Alov5Uzu0

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2024