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ResPower Super/Farm™

ResPower Super/Farm™ - Blender Tutorial : Character Rigging

By: Cory King

Edited By: Sarah Gates

Overview

This is a work-in-progress/tutorial for modeling, rigging, and animating a character in Blender. Our character is a fat, obnoxious boss.

This tutorial covers modeling, rigging, and animation in Blender 2.46. It is mainly aimed at those who have little or no experience with these tools. Plenty of screenshots and intermediate .blend files will be provided so that readers can follow along and a .blend file of the finished product will be provided at the end.

While my aim is to provide some insight for those interested in using Blender, I am by no means a Blender expert. I will almost assuredly do some things in the most inane and impractical fashion you can imagine, so be prepared. My goal here is to get something that works well enough, not to change the world with groundbreaking new techniques.

You can obtain a printer-friendly version of this page by clicking here .

Some preliminary steps before you begin:

Get Blender. It's hard to use a Blender tutorial if you don't have the software. Version 2.40 was the latest as of this writing, and screenshots will reflect this.
If you would like to use the ResPower Super/Farm™ to greatly reduce render times for your animations, go to the main page and click 'new user'. Then get a Blender subscription. They are cheap and allow unlimited rendering, both really good things.
Take a patience pill. Blender is a very powerful piece of software, but getting used to all of its quirks can be frustrating. When you want to take your mouse and hit it with a sledge hammer because clicking the right mouse button never does what it should do, step back, take a breath, and think happy thoughts. Then try from a different approach.

The Body

Think outside the box -
When you start Blender, you will see the default box and you will be in overhead view. Delete the default box by pressing the 'x' key.

Hit enter to complete the deletion and then move to front view by pressing '1' on the number pad.

Starting the body -
First, make sure you are in Object Mode:

Now press the space bar to get the pop-up menu and select Add->Mesh->UVsphere.

The default values of 32 segments and 32 rings are fine, so hit OK for both of those options and you should end up with this:

Note that Blender has automatically put you into edit mode and all of the vertices of your newly created mesh are yellow, meaning they are currently selected. Now switch to side view by pressing '3' on the number pad and get ready to rotate.

Do the twist -
Make sure you are in side view, with all of your sphere's vertices selected, and that the cursor is in the 3d viewing area. Blender is very sensitive to the position of the cursor at any given time and having it in the wrong place at the wrong time will do nothing in the best case and do something you don't want in the worst. So, with your cursor near the sphere, hit 'r'. This will start your sphere rotating about the normal of your viewing plane. This means that if you are in side view, you can see a small figure with the letters z and y in the bottom left corner of the 3d viewing area and the viewing plane is the z-y plane. A normal to the z-y plane is in the x direction, so your sphere will be rotating about x. Changing to top view (number pad 7) will rotate your object around z, and front view (number pad 1) will rotate your object around y. Rotating your view (by pressing and dragging the middle mouse button) will allow you to rotate about any arbitrary axis. Holding down the control button will allow you to rotate in 5 degree increments, so hold down control and rotate your sphere for 90 degrees until it looks like this.

Now left mouse click to commit your rotation.

Scaling -
This is going to be our fat, obnoxious boss's fat, obnoxious body. Unless your boss looks really wierd, his body won't be perfectly spherical, so we need to scale it a bit. We aren't really trying to make an anatomically perfect model of our boss here. It will be relatively cartoony so that your real boss won't know it's him and fire you for calling him fat and obnoxious. So make sure you are in side view first and then deselect all of your vertices with the 'a' key. You may also want to zoom in a bit by rolling the mouse wheel forward until your sphere fills most of the 3d viewing area. Now we are going to be directly moving vertices here and we want to be able to see all of the vertices we will be working with, so switch to wireframe mode by pressing 'z' or selecting it from the list of options here.

Your vertices should now all be pink (unselected) and the faces of the sphere should be a sort of translucent blue so that you can see through them. With your cursor in the 3d viewing area, press 'b'. This is the border select tool and it allows you to select all of the vertices in a box you draw. Using the border select tool, draw a box around all vertices from the center line of the sphere to the right, like this.

With just these vertices selected, we can finally do some scaling. Press the 's' key to start scaling, then immediately press the 'y' key. This will constrain our scaling to just the y direction. Now hold down the control key and move the cursor until you see this in the bottom left corner of the 3d viewing area.

When you have scaled enough, click the left mouse button to commit it. Now your sphere should look like this.

Grab and drop -
Our boss's body is starting to look like a giant belly sticking out of a flat back, but since we scaled down the back, there's a weird, wide area right down the center of the body. To fix this, we will grab and manually move all of the vertices on the back half of the body. Unless you've gone wild clicking and moving since the last paragraph, the back half of the body is still selected. To move it forward, we will press the 'g' key, immediately followed by the 'y' key to only move it in the y direction. Do this now, moving the vertical line of veritices back into alignment with the blue z axis in the background, like this.

Symmetry - yrtemmyS
If an object is symmetrical (as most humans are) it is often easiest to model one half of the object then just mirror the object to get the other side. That is what we will be doing here, so move into front view and unselect all veritices. Use the bounding box tool ('b') to select all the vertices to the left of the center line. Do not include the center line in this selection as we will be needing these vertices in the future. Your selection should look like this.

Now press 'x' and select vertices from the list, and voila! You now have half a fat guy.

So Far...
If you are lost (or lazy) and would like to see the progress we've made, I've got the perfect thing for you...A NEW CAR!!!
I'm kidding, it's just a .blend file.

Surf's up
For this model, we will be using smooth subsurfing to get a nice, smooth texture. Switch to Object mode, either by selecting it from the dropdown box or just pressing 'tab'. Make sure that what is left of our sphere is selected and outlined in pink. If it isn't, right click on the object and it should get selected. Also make sure you are in the solid viewing mode. If your sphere is shown in wire-frame, select solid from Draw Type selection menu like this,

or just press 'z' to toggle back and forth. Go to the Editing panel by clicking it's button on the interface or pressing F9 if you aren't already there. Now, near the bottom of the screen is a button that says 'Set Smooth'.

See it? Click it. It won't stay down or give you any confirmation or anything, but if you are in solid mode you should see your model turn into something like this.

Now we're going to subsurf it. In the same panel is a section with the label 'Modifiers.' Click on the 'Add Modifier' button and select subsurf. Like this.

It should change into something like this.

Change 'levels' to 2 and 'render levels' to 3. The 'levels' option decides how many levels of subsurfing to do in the 3d view and 'render levels' decides how many levels of subsurfing to do for the rendered image. You won't see much change in the 3d view after you add a subsurf modifier unless you go back into wireframe mode by pressing 'z'. There you will see that blender has added lots of new faces to your mesh to make it nice and smooth. The great thing about subsurfing is that you can move just one or two vertices, and Blender will automatically move all the tiny subsurfaces for you so that your model will remain nice and smooth. If you've followed along to this point, your rendered image (F12) should look alot like this.

Copy and mirror
Move into edit mode and front view and press 'a' to select all vertices. Now, left click as close as you can to the blue line in the background that represents the z axis. Now hit Shift+s (as if you were trying to type a capital S) and select Cursor->Grid. This will snap your 3d cursor to the grid and prepare you to mirror your object. Now, with all the vertices still selected, hit Shift+d, then click the right mouse button. Shift+d creates a copy of all selected vertices and clicking the right mouse button prevents you from moving them around. At this point, your scene should look like this.

Now, select '3d Cursor' from the pivot menu, like this.

Now hit 'm' for mirror, and then press the 'x' key. This will cause your copy of one side of the boss to be mirrored accross and form the other side. Now you have a whole boss body. Congrats.
One small bit of clean up to consider is the duplicated vertices along the z axis. To eliminate these, press 'a' until all of your vertices are selected (yellow) and then bring up the 'Specials' list by pressing 'w'. From the list of options, select 'Remove Doubles', like this.

This will join together all vertices that are within a certain small distance of one another, which is exactly what we want. A small box will tell you how many vertices were removed.

You may notice that removing the duplicate vertices has caused some ugly tearing in our object.

This is because the normal vectors of the copied surfaces in our model are not right. They are backwards, which is really the only way they can point if they aren't right, right? Fortunately, blender has a simple way to recalculate the normals. Just press Control+n, and then click 'Recalculate normals outside' or press Enter.

Your tear will go away, and everything will be smooth again.

Mirror Modifier
AndyD over at the elysiun.com forums has informed me that Blender has a nifty tool for doing exactly what we need here. It is a mirror modifier. To use it, go back to the point where you only have half of a body. Now move into object mode, and hit the button that says "Add Modifier" under the Modifiers panel in the Editing pane (F9). From the list that drops down, select Mirror. The default is to mirror over the x axis, which is what we want, so you should just be able to hit the Apply button, ignore the messages that come up, and you're done! This allows you to skip the steps of removing doubles and recalculating normals. Very convenient. Thanks for the tip, AndyD.

Finished Body
If you've followed us to here, this is what you get when you render.

Pretty spectacular, huh? Yeah, I know.
If you got lost, or just didn't feel like following along, here's the .blend file.

A "Treasury of HotKeys"
Robert Penn Warren, anybody? No? Ok. Anyhow, Blender has more HotKeys than you can put in a sack and take to school with you. The interface was "designed" so that one hand would stay on the mouse and the other on the keyboard. While this can be frustrating beyond belief, you start to get used to it after a few months of using it almost every day. If you don't plan on using Blender enough to ever get really comfortable with the interface, you're going to need more than one of the patience pills I spoke of at the beginning of this tutorial. In fact, you'll probably need several bottles.

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