Original subtitles

We can now proceed to rigging and this is basically very large

Topic and it's a bit out of the scope here and I'll try my best to explain everything I can with the limited time frame

For me

it's always about the purpose and the

Context and right now the purpose of the rigging and the armature is just to pose this character for some kind of static

Illustration for a website or some design

But nevertheless this can be a great starting point

To get to know these tools a little bit better get the grips of it and then later

Find some resources to expand on that knowledge

So the first thing when you want to move something when you want to rig something you need the armature

You need to add some bones to your mesh and for that there's an object called armature

So if you press shift a you will see that there are armature options. You might not see

Some of these options here if you didn't activate the rigify at all get to this a little bit later

Basically, you have an option to create a single bone

Let me move this to the side

You don't need to repeat this

I'm just showing you some of these options and then you can just extrude this like you would in the mesh

the difference between the armature and the mesh is that this is a procedural object and

These bones can be manipulated non-destructively

So if you go here the armature has an option for the pose mode and if you go to the pose mode

you can select some of these things and

Rotate and move them and scale them according to their parent bones

And if you then tab out, you will see that this maintains its position

but if you go into the edit mode

There's an original position that it was created in and you can switch between the pose and the rest position here

So this is the basic concept behind those armatures that you can create an object that can be manipulated

Non-destructively and then you would map your mesh around this object so it can move

With it. So let me just delete this and basically you can create a human skeleton from bones like this

Add a mesh to it and then move this bone separately to create some kind of pose. It's totally doable

But but there are some techniques that make the process of posing the armature a little bit easier like the inverse kinematics

and stuff like that when you

Use some bones as only a control bones that somehow

affect how these other bones and joints are behaving and stuff like that so you can basically layer this stuff and

Create much more complex structure that in the end helps you create animations easier

but it's very time-consuming to prepare and

that's why I almost always use the rigify add-on if I want to use armatures and

If you didn't already, please just go to the preferences

Add-ons will enter rig and it will find the rigify add-on here

You will see I have it checked already

so check this checkbox to activate it and just close the preferences and

now if you press shift a you can see there are some of these more options here and you can see

For these armature options. You have something called metarig in the parentheses right next to it

And this is the concept that the rigify uses and I'll try to explain it a little bit here

So, please bear with me for a few more minutes

And again, you don't need to repeat this after me

So I will add the armature and I will add the basic human just for the explanation

Purposes and move it to the side. So I will press G then X and move it to the side and I will focus on that

So the rigify can create armature like this for us if you go to the edit mode, you can see you can select these

bones separately and if you go to the bone options, you will see their name and

You might notice that there is a suffix for some of these bones

It's either L or R. So that's for the left and right

So the bender knows that these are symmetrical and the metarig means

That rigify can use the standard armatures as a blueprint for creating a whole rig

So

Basically, the metarig is just an armature as any other as if you would create it manually. There's no difference at all

The only difference there is that when you have the rigify add-on active

You have some more options for the rigify here

On the armature level like generate rig and some advanced options

But for the bones as well, and if you go to the pose mode

I will hit ctrl tab to switch to the pose mode. You can see there is something called a rig type and

That basically tells rigify add-on what these bones are for. There are some predefined rig types like the limbs

the spine or

Something like that or legs and if you mark your bone with this

You are basically defining the blueprint for the rigify to create some kind of controls for that bone

So for example for the leg that could be inverse kinematic options

And I will show you what I mean, by the way, if we tab out and now just go to the armature tab and click generate the rig

You will see our rig was generated right here on the cursor position and I will move it to the side as well

So press G then X

So this is what happens when you generate the rig with rigify. You have this armature as a blueprint

Basically as a recipe to create something like this and you can just select this and delete it. You don't need it no more

Only if you would like to make some changes

There is still option to click generate rig once again, and it will know that this has to be regenerated

It's not that destructive operation to generate rig

You can still like go inside make some changes and then generate it once again

but they're not connected in any way so you can just delete it right away and

You can see this looks a little bit different than the armature

if you go to the pose mode, you will see all bunch of colored gizmos and

they're here just for the

organizing purposes to make things look a little bit easier and

A little bit more practical and these are some of these additional levels that I was talking about

Where you're not creating only the bone structure for your mesh

but at the same time some of these control bones and gizmos and

If you want to know where these come from

If you explore the scene in the outliner a little bit more you will see that the collection called widgets was created

You will see that it's hidden

but if you expand this you will see that there is a bunch of geometry there hidden and

And

What this means basically is

That when you have a bone on the armature and that could be your custom armature as well

You have the option to switch the visual appearance of the bone with some of the custom mesh

So this is nothing more. These are all bones the same as we created before

These just have some of the custom meshes and colors. So it's a little bit more organized

So if you go to the pose mode

you will see that there is an added level of complexity that these are not only the regular bones that you can rotate and

They are just connected together. But actually if you try to move the foot

it moves some of these other bones as well and stuff like that and

This is basically

Some more advanced rigging so I will just tab out and delete this right away

Okay

I know that this was maybe a handful for a start

But I really wanted to wanted you to see that the Rigify add-on is not some sorcery. It just does some steps

that you would need to do manually and

That would be very time-consuming and it's not easy to make those things

so for example, if you just need to pose your

Illustration for different purposes, you don't need to learn all the rigging technicalities

It can be enough for you to just know how the Rigify works and how to use it

And that's what I want to show you in this chapter right here

so now you can start to follow along and we'll press shift a go to the armature and

create a human metarig

Now go to the armature tab right here if you don't have it active click here

and go to the viewport display and

You can check in front and that will make sure that the bones are always displayed in front of your mesh

So they're easier to handle

And now there are a bunch of things that we don't need so we can just delete some of the stuff from the armature

But still we have to be a little bit careful here. The Rigify isn't that user-friendly

So if you accidentally delete some of the bones that are necessary for generating that rig

It will break and it will generate some of the errors

So one of the most common and that might happen to you as well is when you're editing

This here is not connected to the neck

But they have to share the exact same location the starting and ending point of these bones respectively

Needs to have the same location. Otherwise the Rigify will break so be careful about things like that

Basically try to just delete the things I delete here without moving anything too much

so first of all

I will just drag the selection around all of these face bones press X and delete bones and

the ears as well here

We won't be needing those and we can enable

The bone properties here so we can see actually what bones we are dealing with so you can see this is a part of the spine

so we will definitely need that and

now

If we check it from the side, we created the four finger cartoon hand

This human metarig have obviously full number of fingers. So we'll have to

Delete one. So just select these bones by holding shift press X and delete

and

On the other side as well

Just like that delete

Okay. Now I will tab out and let's look from the front

I will need to scale this up a little bit and of course

We'll need to change this armature quite a lot because this is a cartoon character

You can see he has short legs and stuff like that. So there will be quite a lot to make here

But first I want to make sure that the level of the shoulders is same as the model here

So let's press just S and scale this up like this

But don't forget we'll need to press ctrl a and apply scale because if you would generate rig from the scaled armature that doesn't have scale

Applied the rig would be generated in the original size before the scaling

So right now let's tab in and to make things easier. We will delete one side of

the symmetry bones altogether

So let's just select all of the leg press X and delete

We can now delete this pelvis bone as well, so press X and delete the bone and

the collarbone

the chest bone and

the whole right hand

so right now we only have a spine basically and

Some of these bones that can be then mirrored on the other side

we can now start moving these bones around and let's toggle x-ray so we better see our mesh and

Let's disable the wireframe overlay and when we enable the x-ray

I can see there's some suspicious bone right here when you click twice and

I can see it's called face, and we already deleted all of the face bones

So this is probably a root control bone for the face, and we don't need that

we won't be creating any rig for the face, so let's delete that one and

Here the neck looks okay, we can just select this joint right there press G then Z and move this up a little bit

and

Then select this node right here and press G then Z and drag it all the way up so this will control our head

Right here. We can select all of this press G then Z and move it down and

we can

Additionally select the leg bone and drag it down

So it looks something like this and basically you want to place it where the pelvis bone

Reaches somewhere here, and we can move it right away, so if we select this node right here

You can

Extend the pelvis bone all the way to the side here

And you actually need to do that because it will be used to paint weights over the mesh

So that the legs and hand don't get to fall over the area here

So that's all right and now we'll

And now we can press G then Z and distribute

Some of these bones on the spine a little bit better here

Don't forget as I said here you need to select both of those and to move them at once

Because it would give an error there

Now we can select the hand and move it a little bit here where the shoulders start

We'll get back to this later, and now move this here

so the collarbone as well as the pelvis bone has the control over this area here and

The chest bone

Has the same purpose, so we can just move it here where the breasts are

And look from the side and scale it up a little bit

We'll refine this later from the side view

right now we can take care of the legs and hands so

Select the leg bones, press G then X and move them to the center of the leg

We can move this down a little bit

Basically the leg starts somewhere here

So this will be very short and the movement will be somewhat limited there

You just have to keep this in mind

Okay and right here

Okay and right here

We want to move this

Here where the hand starts

this to the area of the elbow and

Basically, we are almost good to go and now scale this part here

So it's larger

And move it in place and let's rotate it like this

Okay

Now we can look from the side and I think we can move the whole armature a little bit to the back

So press G then Y and move it to the middle of the body like this

Now we can see what adjustment needs to be made. So let's make this one larger

So it affects the larger area there

And same here we need to move this a little bit to the back

This area to the front

Okay, so something like this

And this is a very important bone

For some of the leg controls. So move it all the way back here

Press G then Y move it here and we will scale it up

So it's wide as the leg itself so something like this

Okay, and we can move this so it's not so steep

Okay

Now I can see that this is a little bit too back

To in the back so I'll press G and Y and let's look from the top

Move this on the y-axis

And we'll start placing the fingers and that's probably the most tedious part of this whole process so first of all, let's

Adjust the palm a little bit

Like that now select the thumb

Let's move it more in place here

And distribute these bones

So it more makes sense. You will have to rotate this a little bit so you can see if it goes out of the mesh

Basically, you want to place this in the middle of the finger

Like that

okay, it looks good for the thumb and

Let's just repeat this for all of the other fingers and in a similar way that you would do in a mesh

You can use the shortcuts like clicking the bone and ctrl clicking here to select the whole

part

Let's rotate this a little bit move it up. So it sits a little bit better with that index finger

and

Be careful around the parts here. You can see once more. There are two nodes here and

We don't want them to separate because I think that would throw the error

With the Rigify add-on, so do it like this

Then from the top side you can move this to the side a little bit

Once again, don't forget that one as well

Okay

Looking good so far and let's repeat the process

You

Okay looks fine in my opinion so

That was the hand and right now we can take care of some of the details

you can inspect your model all around place some of these joints in a way that you find a little bit more accurate and

You know, it's hard to talk about accuracy when we are dealing with the cartoon character so really

Just go with the hunch and try to make something you can always change it later

So as you can see

we only did the left part and as I said before we need symmetrize this and

If you try to select these bones, you can see their name is always followed with the suffix dot L

and

That way it's very easy to

Symmetrize this you can just select all with a don't worry when you're selecting these bones in the middle

click armature and

Symmetrize and that will create the mirror duplicates of all of these bones that had the L suffix and give them suffix R and

It will leave those in the middle without the suffixes alone

So this is now complete armature

We can now tab out and I just want to point out that you could easily

Let me toggle the x-ray. We could easily parent the mesh to this armature and

It would work. We would be able to move this around but we wouldn't have those controls that I've shown you

That the rigify can create for you

So let's just now go here to the armature settings and under the rigify buttons here. Click generate rig

And you will see that the rig got generated right away and for some reason it probably

Remembered the position when I moved it there. So let's just click the rig and press alt G to

Reset the position

You probably won't see this problem

so if you haven't play around with armatures like I did before the rig should be generated in place right here and

Luckily, there were no errors the rig got generated successfully

The size of the rig is quite alright

You can see that all the controls match their respective parts of the body

So right now we can just select this original armature this metal rig and press M and move this to backup

So it doesn't get in the way and now we are basically ready to add all of the meshes to this rig

But first I want to make sure

Once again that these that the mesh is without any errors

So let's just select all and we need to deselect the rig

So ctrl drag here to the selected you can see in the outliner and you can see in the outliner

we have only the mesh object selected and now tab in into the edit mode and

Let's select all and first of all

I want to press shift N to recalculate normals in case there would be problem with them and

Then press M and merge by distance and we can see the blender removed zero vertices

So we had no double geometry and our normals should be calculated correctly now that we press shift N

So I'm confident that this mesh will work fine

with the rig

so let's step out and now select only the body and

shift click the rig that was generated for us and

The way you add the mesh to the rig is by parenting so we will press ctrl P for parenting

And you can see there's an option to armature deform

You can see there are a bunch of options and they all have to do something together with

groups and weights

So let me explain for a while if you select the body and go to the object data properties here

You can see there is an section for vertex groups

You should already know what this is good for for example

if you selectively need to apply some modifier to only some of the vertices and

Stuff like that and this is the technique that the armature used to control the position of the geometry

so if you have some bone it has some respective vertex group that it controls and

As you know when you create a vertex group, you can adjust the weight of how the vertex is connected to that group

So it's not just the 0 1 but actually you can have a 0.5 weight

So when you move that vertex group the vertex follows only halfway because its weight it's set to 0.5

so this is the technique that the armature uses and

Additionally, it will add the modifier for the armature deformations. So that's what that parenting will do for us

so again, we can shift click the armature press ctrl P and

Choose the armature deform with automatic weights. This is something we are interested in

We don't want to paint every vertex group ourselves or add everything

Manually, we want as much of this done automatically as we can. So let's select this

And now if we inspect the body again, you can see that there is an modifier which says armature

It has the object rig and it's bound to vertex groups

and now if we go to the object data properties, you can see there are a bunch of vertex group created for us and

As I said before if you select some of the vertex groups and if you now go to the edit mode

You will see that the option for assigning weight to some of these vertex groups is available

But the easier way of applying weights is through weight painting and that's available in the modes here. So

You already know object edit mode

The texture paint mode and now there's one more which is called weight paint

Now if you select that you will see this blue mesh and some of the parts are colored differently

it basically shows you how much of

Some of these vertices belong to their respective

Vertex groups. So if you click through this vertex group

Right now you will see

the different weight options there and

That something that was created automatically for us. That's why we pick the automatic weight options because

We would need to do this manually if that wasn't there

So, let me repeat this

once more a little bit the way I like to rig my character is to use some of these metal rigs and

Every purpose then for whatever model or body I need

Then create a rigify rig

Which makes the control of the armature very easy and then I just parent the mesh object to the armature with automatic weights

So as much as possible is done for me automatically and then the armature controls the mesh

Through these vertex groups that are painted non-linearly

So let me switch back to the object mode

now select this rig and we can take it for a spin a little bit so ctrl tab to switch the pose mode and

Here you can see this serves as a control for the root of the whole mesh

So if you move this you basically move the whole rig without moving the origin point

these parts here

serve as the inverse kinematics control for the legs and hands so this way you can control the position of the leg and

this is for the hand movements and

Again, this is the inverse kinematic control. So when you start to move this up, you will see that the joint

is

moving too and

This allows for some stretches. So if you're doing if you're working on a cartoon or something this works nicely

So I immediately like how this mesh

Is deformed and of course there are some other bones like this where you can control the position of the pelvis

And you can see how the hands and legs stay at their place so you can easily do

Funny stretches like this

Yeah, take it for a spin yourself

It's quite fun, but we are not finished yet because right now we just parented the body and

We need to add rest of the objects as well

So and there are different ways how I will do this for the different kinds of objects

So for example this part up here with the mask head the feathers and the branches

I want them parented to that spine to the last spine bone

For the head movement and I want them to be part of the vertex group as a whole. I don't want any dynamic

Weight painting or anything there. I

Really don't want the mask to be deforming or branches or stuff like that

so right now I will press ctrl tab to exit the pose mode and

We can now select the feathers

mask branches and the head dummy and

Shift click the body and press ctrl J to join them in there

basically nothing changed right now because these objects weren't part of the body mesh when we

Added on the armature, so they are not part of any of these vertex groups

We have to do this manually right now, which is exactly what we want

so let's just tab in right now, and I will hover over the body object press L and

Press H to hide and

Now we can press A to select all of the objects

We just joined with the body mesh, and let's find the vertex group for the spine

006 and that's the largest bone at the top which controls the position of the head and we'll just click assign

Now press alt H to unhide the body we can tab out and if we now switch here to the weight paint mode

And

Click through the vertex group. You will see this all is blue and if you select the spine object

This whole part is red so that last bone has absolute control

Over the position of these vertices there will be no deformations happening nothing

So if I go to the object mode

Now and we select armature and press ctrl tab for the pose mode

Let me enable the x-ray, so this gizmo right here is for the head control

And if you now press R and rotate this we can control the head like this if you press R twice

You have absolute control over how the body moves and it moves at once without any deformations, which is exactly what I wanted

so let's press ctrl tab and now the last thing we need to do to add these accessories and

That might be a little bit tricky

Because there are outside the body. They're a little bit

Complicated in terms of the shape and

The automatic weight painting might not always produce the result you are going for

So just please keep in mind that we might need to modify this heavily after adding to the armature right now

We don't need to add these objects to the body object. We can parent them separately, which is a useful thing sometimes

so right now just select all of these objects and

Select the armature as the last so shift click here press ctrl P and parent them with automatic weights

so right here if you see the

Armature object in the outliner if you expand on that you will see that the body is

Parented the rig object at the same time these other objects as well

And we parented them with automatic weights and right now. I really don't know how these automatic weights were applied here, so

Please bear with me if there are some errors. We will fix them. So

Let's just move the body a little bit to see how the talisman works

But so far so good. We can see here. It goes into the body, but we can

modify that later

with some custom weight painting

Looks fine so far. I'm really surprised

This looks great. There's almost nothing we need to do and there will be some details

We need to fix like if you move the body and stretch it too far the leg bone actually has quite effect on the bell

Here, which is not so great

But all in all I think this looks okay. Yeah, we'll definitely need to deal with the belt

So yeah right now. Just go and try to break the model to see

Where there are some issues and have some fun like this

And

Don't worry, you can't really break the armature

If you're in the pose mode and whatever adjustments to the bones to these controls you make it can be all

Reset very easily if you select all go to the pose clear transform and all

It will reset so don't worry about that and of course don't forget to save

You