Original subtitles

- [Instructor] In this video, we will have a quick look

to the Wiggle bone add-on.

Activated, the add-on gives you access to the wiggle option

that has to be activated pair bones.

To get the add-on, you can simply check the link

into the documentation of the course.

A latest version of the Wiggle bone add-on by Steve.

Then in blender, simply install it

by going into Edit preferences.

Add-on, click the install button.

Browse and find the .pi file of the wiggle bone add-on.

Click the install button and then make sure

that the Wiggle bone add-on is activated.

There is another add-on called the Spring Bone add-ons

by Artel, creator of Auto Rick Pro.

But the add-on is still experimental

and it only works on chains of parented bones.

For this demonstration,

I provided one file with two different animation.

The sliding and rotating animation called whipping action

and a second action with some jumpy bones.

Only the lower bone in the chain is currently animated.

Let's select the free bones in the chain

that are the children of this one

and activate the Wiggle bone add-on on this

and press the play button.

By default, the reset on loop option is activated.

To enable or disable this option,

you do it for all the bones at once.

When using the add-on on the cycle,

it's better to disable the option

so that the simulation continue at runtime

and we don't get the popping frame

at the beginning of the motion.

Wiggle bone add-on simulate physical behavior on your bone.

We can access different properties

of those physical behavior

through the panel whose properties are editable.

Pair bone, let's see in detail the different properties.

The amplitude rotation option will increase

or decrease the rotation angle of your bones.

With my three bone selected,

I will enter the value one, hold Alt and press enter.

This way, all the selected bones values are set to one.

With the value of one,

we can see that we almost have no rotation on the bones

while if I set it to 180 degrees,

you can see that the rotation gets pretty wild.

The stiffness value will kind

of change the reaction speed of the bone.

The higher the stiffness, the more rigidity you are breaking

making the bones reacting as if it was a metal spring

while with a very low stiffness,

it looks more organic like hairs or cloth.

So damping value greatly changed the behavior of the bones.

The higher the damping value,

the more absorption you will have

in the motion of the bones.

If you drastically decrease the value of the damping,

you will have a very jittery bones

that will react to any of the motion in the chain.

You should keep the damping value between zero and one.

If you enter a value beyond one,

it will likely creates bugs.

And one of the big issues of this add-on is

that once the simulation is bugging,

you kind of have to revert your file or reload it.

So be cautious with this.

It's the same for the Stiffness.

Don't go over one.

You won't have any change of behavior.

And at some point, it might bug.

In this specific case,

changing the translation value won't do anything.

And we will see why later in this video.

For the time being, let's increase the stretching value.

As expected, the bones are now stretching.

While it won't generate bugs,

I advise you to keep the value pretty low

and play in the range of zero to one.

The gravity value, as expected,

will kind of change the weight of your bones.

If you get to a pretty high value, like five or 10,

you will see your bones like falling.

While using the gravity value in a pretty broad range,

I didn't meet any bugs.

So as you have understand, you have to be kind of creative

and experiment a lot with the different values

for the different bones

until you get the simulation you want.

Convert those simulation into an action or an animation,

we need to bake.

To be able to bake the action of the bones,

you have to make sure that they are selected.

By clicking the select wiggle bones button,

you will select all the bones

that have the wiggle bone option enabled.

You've seen in the previous video,

baking an animation is done through the NLA editor.

When opening the NLA editor,

I can see my current weeping action being used.

By now, click the bake wiggle button

in the wiggle bone panel.

It will bake the wiggle simulation

on all the selected bones.

And we can see that it does create a new NLA track

including the weeping action.

And on top of this, we can see our new baked action.

Let's push it down into the NLA editor.

And if we deactivate it,

we can see that our bones are no longer rotating.

Thus, when we click the bake wiggle,

it will remove the wiggle option onto those bone.

So what we see are currently the animation of those bones.

Additive bake option simply create an NLA track

including the original action

so that the bake action can be layered on top of it.

If we deactivate the additive bake

and then bake the wiggle action,

we will only see the result of the wiggle.

Since the root bone wasn't choosing the wiggle add-on,

it's not moving anymore.

This, we then need to manually add those action

into the NLA editor.

When both the weeping action

and the baked action are enabled,

we can see the whole animation we have generated.

So particularly, I advise you

to keep the additive bake enabled.

I will reset everything

and I will select the second animation.

The jumping one.

As you can see, we have some amplitude on the translation

but the bones are not offsetting

and this is because they are connected in the rig.

So I need to go into edit mode,

select those bone and press Alt + P to unparent them

or keep them parented but disconnect them.

And now we can see that they are getting offsetted based

on the translation value.

If we increase this value, there will be more jittery

and they will move in space a lot more.

I advise you to keep this value between zero and one.

It's a very powerful tool that can allow you

to get very nice results fast

but you may need to edit to beat the rig.

So let's now try the add-on on our Mac.

I've just reloaded the base motion file.

We have the work cycle enable in the action editor.

I will select the Bodhi controller and I will enable

then we go add-on.

As soon as I activate the add-on on the Bodhi controller,

we can see our character shaking on each step

which is kind of cool.

I have a drop in performances which is kind of expecting

since it's running a simulation in real time

but it's definitely okay for me to work on this

increasing the Stiffness and the dumping

to get a more natural motion or something I like more.

But there is a little issue

or at least limitation compared to the previous method.

Here, I can't choose what part

of the body is currently leading.

And as you can see, whenever the character is dropping down,

the front part is dropping down also.

So it's the back part of the body

that is currently dragging in the motion.

So Blender kind of assumed that the back part of the body

is currently heavier than the front part

which is not what I did in my animation previously.

And this is not something I can change.

I have no option to deal with this.

It depends on the base orientation of the bone in the rig.

But as an animator, you may not want to edit the rig.

Whenever you want to use this,

you will break everything for sure.

And another big limitation is

that we can't constraint one rotation angle.

Here, you can see that the antenna is currently rotating

along all its axis even if the axis are locked.

So this is a fantastic add-on

but if you want to create precise animation

or precise motion along a specific axis,

it might not be the best choice

but for any organic propose, it can be a huge time saver.