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ResPower Super/Farm™

ResPower Super/Farm™ - Blender Tutorial : Character Rigging

By: Cory King

Edited By: Sarah Gates

Overview

This is the third part in my tutorial on character creation with Blender. If you didn't read the first two parts, part one can be found here. You will need at least the .blend file from part 2 to pick up where we left off last. I'm assuming a fair level of comfort with the Blender interface at this point, so if you are still shaky with the basic concepts like moving the view, selecting and deselecting vertices and objects, and rotation and scaling, either read the first page again or hop over to blender.org and look for more help.

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.

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

Rigging

Bones -
Blender has an intuitive way of imagining how your character would move. This is done by assigning bones to the character and giving each bone a sphere of influence so that moving an arm bone only moves the arm and moving a leg bone only moves the leg. We can also assign individual vertices to a bone in case the sphere of influence is too general. To begin, open the .blend file and move to front view and object mode. Now, deselect everything with 'a' and then hit the spacebar and add an armature.

This adds an armature with a single bone, but it's probably pretty hard to see at first. Try switching on the toggle 'x-ray' in the armature panel.

This keeps the armature you have just created in front of everything else in the 3d viewing area. Don't worry, they won't show up at all in your rendered image, but bringing them to the front makes it much easier to work with them when you are rigging and posing. You should now be in edit mode, and the bone you just added should be in the center of your model. Right click somewhere inside the bone to select the entire bone and move it so that it is about here.

Extrude -
Extrusion is one of the coolest tools in Blender. We used it before to make arms and legs, and now we will use it for our armature. Hit 'a' to deselect everything and then right click on the top ball of the bone so that only the top ball is yellow, and the rest of the bone is pink. Now press 'e' and move the top of your new bone up to about the neck of your character. Like this.

Select just the center ball again and move it to about the same height as your character's arms. Now we are going to make arms. With that center ball still selected, extrude a bone to the right (your character's left) and place the end near where the arm begins. Like this.

Once you set the shoulder, just press 'e' again to make the arm. Now select that center ball again, and do the same process, but make a right arm instead. You should end up with something like this.

Now we are going to make a 'belly bone.' This will give us control over our boss's big, fat belly so that we can make it jiggle if we wish. Select the first bone you created in the character's lower back. Make sure the whole bone is selected and press 'w'. In the specials menu that comes up, select subdivide.

Now select the new joint in between the two bones you just created and switch to side view. Don't worry about the fact that the bones you've created to match up perfectly with your model in side view. We'll fix that in a minute. Press 'e' to extrude a bone out to the edge of the boss's belly, like this.

Now, select the joint at the neck and extrude a head bone, then select the bottom most joint and extrude two legs, like this.

Now switch to side view and move your joint so that they match up, like this.

This seems like a pretty good place to give out a new .blend file.

Sphere of influence -
Now you have a model, and a bone structure, but the two don't know about each other just yet. You have to tell your model, "Hey! I want you to move along with so-and-so bone structure," in order for it to do you much good. To do that, hit tab to move into object mode, then select your armature if it isn't already pink. Now look at the "Link and Materials" panel in the bottom left corner of the screen and you should see AR:Armature and OB:Armature. These are the datablock and object names for the armature you just created. Now, select the body of your model by right clicking on it. Under the "modifiers" panel near the bottom of the screen, select the add modifier button, then choose armature.

In the field that says Ob: type the name of your armature object, which should be Armature. Now, your model knows that it should be deformed by an armature named Armature, so that when Armature is changed in Pose Mode, the model will change with it. Move into front view if you aren't already there and select your armature. You should be in object mode. Now hit Control+Tab to move into Pose Mode. Pose Mode is where you ... well, pose your model. Right click a bone and it should be highlighted in blue. Now press 'r' to rotate it and you should see the model deform with the bone. Cool huh? Our bones aren't very good right now, so we get weirdness like this.

In the armature panel at the bottom of the screen there is a section called "Display Options". Select the button that says "Envelope" in this section. This will show you the sphere of influence for each bone in your armature. Any vertex within the shaded area around a bone will be affected when that bone is scaled, rotated, moved, or otherwise altered. You can scale the sphere of influence by pressing Alt+s and moving the mouse. There is no good rule for scaling spheres of influence. You just want it big enough to do what you want to do. You can always clear out what you have changed in pose mode by using these options

so play around with things and see what happens.

Vertex Groups -
Sometimes a sphere of influence just isn't precise enough. In these cases, vertex groups can be used to attach specific vertices to specific bones, no matter where the vertices are. We will be using a vertex group to control the head of our model, so scale the sphere of influence for you head bone down to almost 0 so that it doesn't affect things. Now select your model and move into edit mode. Select all the vertices in the head and look at the bottom left corner of the screen. There is a panel that says Link and Materials and a lable that says Vertex Groups. Hit the New button and with all of your head's vertices selected, hit assign. You can tell what vertices are in a vertex group by deselecting everything with 'a', then hitting the Select button under Vertex Groups. The name of this vertex group starts off with the default "Group" but that isn't very descriptive. Change it to "Head" by clicking in the text box and typing. It should look like this when you're done.

Now, go back into object mode, select your head bone, go into pose mode, rotate it and ... nothing. What happened? Well, you have a vertex group named Head, and you have a head bone, but there is no underlying connection between them. Unfortunately, the way to connect them is by naming them the same thing. I personally think that forcing people to name separate entities the same thing so that they will be linked is bad design, but that's the way it works. So, change the name of your head bone to Head, like this.

Now rotate your head and you should see some good movement.

Conclusion -
That's the basic process for modeling, rigging, and posing. Blender has many, many more tools and options that vary in ease of use and usefulness, but this should give you a good place to start. I'm giving out the .blend file of exactly what we've done up to this point and you can improve upon it as you see fit. I hope this has been helpful, and happy Blendering.

Contact -
If you have corrections or clarifications for this little series, would like information about the ResPower Super/Farm™, or would like to contact me for any other reason, I can be reached at support@respower.com. Credit for corrections and improvements will be given where it is due.

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