Tutorial: My New Rigging Workflow in Blender

in this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can rig any creature in blender if you wanted to learn rigging for a while but haven't yet found that one workflow that just works this is it this is the one so I did make a tutorial about this a few months back but in that workflow I'm using multiple Armature objects in the same rig I'm placing empty objects left and right I'm adding weird constraints I'm basically digging myself a hole for 55 minutes straight so since then I've learned a lot and I've got a much easier and faster workflow that I can't wait to show you so here we are in London version 3.3 and we're going to start off by deleting everything and creating an Armature object and inside of this object our entire rig is going to be placed bones and ik constraints and everything so let's go to edit mode and now you can see that we can edit this bone so let's view this from the side and you can select one of the end pieces here and you can hold down control and it will snap to the grid and a nice way to make this always snap to the grid is to enable this magnet icon you can also press shift tab so now you can move this around and it will always snap to the grid which is going to make it a lot easier to place these mechanical Parts after we've made the rig okay so this bone is going to be our core bone and I want to make a six-legged insect so let's start out by making the two front legs first and then duplicate them and work our way backwards so let's view this from the top and to duplicate our core bone let's go shift d and now let's go R and then rotate it by 90 degrees let's hold down control so let's extrude this by selecting this part and pressing e let's do two meters and then let's do one more with two meters and then actually let's do one more I think you can press shift R yeah okay perfect so each leg is going to be four parts I think that's good so let's do this for the other side as well shift D um place it here he extrude extrude extrude now these are going to be the legs but we are also going to be using something called inverse kinematics which basically means that we want some controller bones at the edge of these legs so let's make one more bone but let's just make it a short one like this and let's do it over here as well okay so let me just disable the snapping for now what's really important about these bones is that this cannot be connected to this because that's going to mess things up so you want to select these ik controllers and go alt P clear parent so now this is an individual bone and then this one clear apparent now what we have we have our core bone we have our right leg we have our left leg and we have these ik controllers at the edges perfect so now we can test this rig by going to post mode so let's go to post mode you can also press Ctrl Tab and just pull down like this and here you can see that these bones are all connected to each other you could animate your legs like this this would take a long time like can you imagine how long this would take so we are going to use something called inverse kinematics which is amazing so select this ik controller and hold down shift and select this bone and go shift I which is ADD ik and then set it to active bone so now you can select the ik controller and you can move this around and it looks good let's do this for the other leg as well select the ik controller first and then this bone and then shift I to active bone so now we got this ik controller here and we got it here but there's one thing that we're forgotten to do we have forgotten to connect these legs to the core ball so let's go back to edit mode by pressing tab let's select the first bone of each leg this and this and then hold down shift and select the core bone Ctrl p and make parent keep offset so now we got this relationship line here which is perfect but now when we go back to post mode things are going to look really weird now let's try and move this around look at that yeah this is a little bit weird so what's happening here is that both of these ik constraints are trying to control the entire rig like this we want the ik controllers to stop here at the center so to fix this let's select one of the bones with the ik controller let's go to Bone constraint properties and here you can see the chain length is set to zero which is basically Infinity but if you set it to wireframe shading you can see that when we start increasing this you can see that we're changing the chain length and we want it to stop here so now when we move this it works as intended again so let's do this for the odd one as well okay sweet this is all coming together okay so now let's try and give our rig an interesting post and I'm going to show you a really big problem with this ring so let's place this hair let's place this hair and now we can take this core bone you can move this up you can rotate it around and it's actually it's looking quite powerful already however if you move the ik controllers you can see that these legs move really unnaturally it doesn't make sense look at that no one walks like this so to fix this weird Behavior we can go over to the Bone properties under inverse kinematics and we can start locking the different axes of the bone so for example we want this bone to lay completely flat and then we want it to go up like this so let's just try it let's see x-axis okay it's not that one it's not that one there we go it's the z-axis and then let's also move this a little bit over here so we can see yeah we also want to clean up this little weird rotation so now this bone is only rotating on the x-axis like this this bone as well is probably going to be the same axis yep yeah okay so that looks correct okay so now let's do these other bones but these three bones are going to have the same axis so let's hold down shift and select all of them so now we can hold down alt and try this on all these bones so yeah this looks correct and then it's going to be the y-axis as well okay good so now all these bones have their X and Y axis locked and they can only move on the z-axis look at that this looks like a lot more natural leg movement yeah now this bone essentially only moves like this and these bones will only move like this so it's a lot easier to make this joint or use the joint objects in for example the mechanical creature kit okay so now we have to do the same for the other leg okay perfect okay so now we want to add more legs but before we do that I just like to reset the position of these bones so press a to select everything go to pose clear transform all so let's go back to edit mode now we're going to duplicate these legs and at this point in the tutorial you can choose how many legs you want I want six legs in total so let's click and drag and let's hold down shift and click and drag let's go shift d hold down control and let's do two meters let's go shift R so it's like this now what we can do is you go back to post mode again select all these ik controllers and you can move them down and then if if you like you can actually scale these down and once you've scaled them in you can press alt s to reset the scale so you're basically just adjusting the location then let's move these okay perfect so that's it now you got yourself a six-legged creature with ik setup and it's actually really easy to work with and what's really cool about this is that if you go to object mode you can select the rig you can go to object data properties and you can set it to rest position so now you can see that all these bones are perfectly aligned with the grid so it's really easy to just add objects so I know it's a little bit of an unusual workflow but for me this has been really nice for just figuring out creatures and coming up with unique shapes it feels a little bit backwards at first but once you get used to making first the rig and then adding the objects it's really nice actually so my workflow usually consists of this I first make the rig and then I set it to the rest position and then I use my mechanical creature kit which I just launched you can check it out Link in description so here you can take one of these joints for example let's take one of these and let's take one of these so now you could press Tab and select one of these points press shift s and pull down and go cursor to selected and then you can select one of these and go shift s and then we'll selection to cursor so now when we zoom in on this let's rotate it here you can see that this is going to be perfectly lined up look at that and you can just scale it up and then you could take this one let me just hide this so now here you could scale this up and now this will perfectly line up so now you can parent these objects to the Armature so select the Armature select the bone and then Ctrl P to the Bone which is highlighted and then take another bone like this and parent two bone so now you can take the rig and you can go back to post position now you would have this bone that is it just works [Music] okay so what's really cool about this workflow is that it actually opens up the possibilities to really make any type of break so now what I want to try and make is I want to try and use this same principles to make a much more advanced rig I want to make like a hand that is rigged similar to a walking creature but it's it's a hand instead I haven't tried this yet so I just wanna I just want to see if that's possible so let me just make a new blend file I'm going to make an Armature yes we're going to have a core bone so this will be the index finger I think uh wait hang on this should be longer yeah that's good I think and then this will be the ik bone I have to think for a moment there okay so this is going to be one finger let's first just set this up let's clear the parent let's go to post mode and let's set this up as an ik okay that works now we have to parent these keep offset change the chain length two three okay that's good and in edit mode we want to duplicate the fingers three so that's four fingers and then I wanna make the thumb which is probably over here somewhere and I think that should only be like two right one two yeah and apparent this keep offset and then clear the parent on this and add the ik Boop okay nice look at that now this could be like a hand that is walking around oh no we forgot to do the hand doesn't move like that I forgot to lock the eye case so I'm just going to do it for one of them instead I'm not sure if this is going to work if we look yeah this will be really weird yeah this is going to have to move up that's the only way but maybe we could limit it maybe there oh it still just doesn't it just ignores that that's that's weird okay yeah there's a lot of stuff in rigging that just doesn't make sense okay so that's one finger now we can go back to edit mode and we can duplicate our fingers uh we got a rigged hand which look at that I think this could be a really cool walking hand thing [Music] [Music] okay so that is the workflow I usually use to rig creatures I like to make the rig first as a way to outline the core shape of the creature and then I add features using various type of mechanical parts and instead of modeling these same Parts over and over again I met an asset pack the mechanical creature kit it's got over 250 detailed Parts it comes with eight animated Rigs and a couple of example creatures so this is holidays a crab with eight legs and this is Breen hild a tripod rig using drivers and constraints to emulate a realistic cable system that controls each leg's movement in three axes and if you want to make your own rig super easy to use with the mechanical creature kit simply create an Armature go to edit mode and scale down the bone by a value of 0.04 press shift s and go selection to grid so now the bone is lined up with the grid and the scale fits the asset pack since all the parts are modeled to scale so now you can simply click and drag any part from the asset browser straight into the 3D viewport you can learn more about mechanical creature kit in the demo video and on the product page on Burner Market links in description oh and by the way does anyone know if there's a way to batch parent all selected objects to the closest bone without any deform I can't use the Armature modifier because it will deform the mesh and break most procedure materials and since these models are hard surfaced we don't want them to deform and look each bone has an origin right so the data is here what if it could be one more option in the parent menu to Simply batch parent all these objects to the Armature and just select two nearest bone or something and it will parent all these objects to the rig based on Origin proximity I don't know if this should be an add-on but if this was a part of default blender I would use it all the time thanks for watching foreign [Music] [Music]

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Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2022