Easy Rigging in Blender...

Hey Folks,

I was recently looking at Daniel M. Lara presentation at last years Blender conference and in this video he shows a rig that kind of blew me away:


You can see the one on the right is what I’m used to having to build. Tons of bones with all kinds of constraints and extras. But the one on the left is uses only the bones that you see… But still has all the same functionality!

This is kind of a revelation for me and I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion about exactly how this was done. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts and ideas about this. And, if you already know all about this, please help me understand! :slight_smile:

I’ve tried to link to the point in the video where he starts talking about the rig but I wasn’t able to get it to work on BA. So, just fast forward to 11:27 to see the amazing beauty of this rig.

ALSO…


The next part of the video shows the facial rig. This part is pretty self explanatory and I’ve even made a similar rig when I started seeing the “Easy Rigging” videos Daniel was putting out earlier last year.

However, in the video he references a script written by Antonio Vasquez that adds controller bones to either end and sets it up for stretching and rotating. Does anyone know if this script is available somewhere?

Thanks!

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The link for the bone controller addon is below the u tube video

works in edit mode.

This is kind of a revelation for me and I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion about exactly how this was done. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts and ideas about this. And, if you already know all about this, please help me understand! :slight_smile:

Animation and Rigging discussions are rare. Because there are less animators than people clicking on Render button.
Subjects like this are discussed into general threads.

The second part of video is all about Bendy Bones.
New Bendy Bones, new B-Bones were added at 2.78 release.
Rigging is a technical stuff. With new B-Bones, it is easier but it still takes more times than clicking on a render button to test microdisplacement.
So in discussions about 2.78 ; you will find many posts about people who did not manage to render microdisplacement.
And few posts about riggers who said : New B-Bones looks great I will test them for my next rig.
And in 2.78, there was also version 2 of Grease Pencil.

So now, we don’t know if animators are more numerous to do their own rigs, now. There are probably more riggers using B-Bones.
But because of problems that are shown at the end of the video, there are probably also riggers who did not change their habits.

I have been thinking and dreaming about this video ever since bendy bones came out and I saw that conference video

Zeauro hits it on the head rigging and animation is one side of Blender where it’s hard to find good quality learning material. Just look at Bendy bones Jason Schleifer did a tutorial video and one or two months little you have people posting copy cat videos that add little new info to the ecosystem. Nobody follows the Brue Lee philosophy when they learn things, they forget to add something of their own.

I am currently working on a regular cartoony head using shape keys, mesh modifier, lattices etc but once I start looking into bone based rigs I will definitely be playing with bendy bones…

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I think the point of the video is about how an animator can express himself without going too technical into the rigging. Like making a model and do a quick rig to practice animation.

It’s different from a production rig where you need this rig to do a lot of stuff, linked into many shots and with many people using it.
Then you may need to add more bones to extend functionalities, to be able to tweak the rig or add stuff without breaking things.

Also it may be possible to get a production rig and stay minimalist in bone count but that may need more scripting/cheating/driver stuff , so it doesn’t go much into the "easy rigging " principle. And may not get your life easier as a rigger too.

The more complex/big the project will be , chances are that the rigs and many other things get bigger and complex too. If you’re only modeling and posing a character, a simple FK rig is enough without constraints at all, then the simple rig of Pepeland seem over-complex for this task.

All that said I found very interesting and quite inspiring Pepeland’s talk, it would be very interesting to come up with a workflow where parts of the rigging could be automated into the shots, or with using sculpting tweak like he do on the face, ATM it’s hard to do it on blender with linking system, but it’s great to see such experiments.

About Bbones I think it’s a very great addition, and they extend and simplify the rigging quite a lot in some cases,
I’ve came across this bug : https://developer.blender.org/T48988
I hope that can be solved at some time and it will be perfect…

About bone based facial rigs, it’s great and extend a lot the tweakability of the rig, but you can still manage to have very nice/similar results with shapekeys and lattices.

I have to investigate how it’s done in BlendRig, but in my case I had to put several constraints and action-constraints to automate things like smile/frown,o shapes and this still need corrective shape keys on top of it…
I found that’s not worth it in many cases, unless you’'ve got many time to spend on the rigging and aiming at the top blockbuster quality.

In the other hand what Pepeland has done in his video seems quite faster to come with than having good shapes that works… So I guess it depends a lot on the case still.

About rigging ressources online, you can look into humane rigging, and mancandy FAQ for the facial rig. Stop Staring, the book by Jason Osipa is a must read if your serious about this subject. They all cover a large aera of the rigging, teaching how to do things and why. It’s true that there is not much great free ressources about rigging. Long time ago there were BSOD (blender summer of doc) about rigging that was worth checking, but I guess now it’s quite old …

Cheers…

Hey Zeauro, I’m actually already aware of the Bendy bones. I’ve actually been using them for a few years now. Even before the new upgrades. I guess I need to ask specific questions:

  • I’ve had to make multi chain arms many, many times before. How is he able do this without multi chains? How do you to switch between IK and FK state without a switch?

  • How do you set up the arm so that the curvature works properly at the elbow? Are you able to make it sharp or curved somehow?

  • Bones look like they are in stick mode. But, when I try this with bendy bones, I don’t see the curves? How was this done?!

  • Watching the video, you see him grab the finders and move them around with IK but I see no bone used as an IK goal. How is this done?

  • In general, how is this rig setup? How is he able to get so much control with so few bones? Does anyone know? Has anyone spoken to Daniel about this rig?

Thanks!

Yeah definitely. A lot of this could be so much easier if there was a decent (read: Easier) driver system in place. I suggested a driver constraint a while back but I think without an existing example, it’s hard for people to imagine. And actually, I really feel that a proper driver system, like Maya’s “Set Driven Key” or Modo’s “Relationships” is the key to making this stuff easier.

Not to mention, the sculpting part would be so much easier with sculpt layers that have animatible opacity. This would allow you to use a sculpt layer instead of a shape key. Then, you don’t have to skin to a dense mesh. You just rig a regular mesh then add a sculpt modifier after the armature modifier and keep all the detail in there.

About bone based facial rigs, it’s great and extend a lot the tweakability of the rig, but you can still manage to have very nice/similar results with shapekeys and lattices.

I have to investigate how it’s done in BlendRig, but in my case I had to put several constraints and action-constraints to automate things like smile/frown,o shapes and this still need corrective shape keys on top of it…
I found that’s not worth it in many cases, unless you’'ve got many time to spend on the rigging and aiming at the top blockbuster quality.

I have to tell you something, I never even knew about Action Constraints until you just mentioned them… Oh my god! So awesome!

In the other hand what Pepeland has done in his video seems quite faster to come with than having good shapes that works… So I guess it depends a lot on the case still.

About rigging ressources online, you can look into humane rigging, and mancandy FAQ for the facial rig. Stop Staring, the book by Jason Osipa is a must read if your serious about this subject. They all cover a large aera of the rigging, teaching how to do things and why. It’s true that there is not much great free ressources about rigging. Long time ago there were BSOD (blender summer of doc) about rigging that was worth checking, but I guess now it’s quite old …

Cheers…

Thanks for the reply! I’m actually working in Animation now and have been for over 20 years. I’m mostly just amazed by the simplicity of his rig and now nice it appears to work. I’m looking for information specifically about how he built this rig.

I don’t know. He was presenting this as a WIP and talked about scripts that would be released.
So, he probably found a way to have a switch without the need of a double chain by scripting as suggested by sozap.

The elbow is just made of 2 bendy bones. One for arm and one for forearm.
Inside a chain of bendy-bones, it is how they react in 2.78.
You can make them sharp or curved. You just have to animate B-Bones offsets settings for that or use custom handles.

They are not in stick mode. They are in Wire mode available in 2.78, too.

I don’t know. Maybe it is the cube. Maybe he forgot this one was hidden although it is on same layer.

Excellent! I didn’t know about this either. Thanks!

  	 			 			 				 					Originally Posted by <b>Indy_logic</b> 					[![https://blenderartists.org/design/baorg2012dark/images/buttons/viewpost-right.png](https://blenderartists.org/design/baorg2012dark/images/buttons/viewpost-right.png)](https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=3219273#post3219273) 				
  		- Watching the video, you see him grab the  finders and move them around with IK but I see no bone used as an IK  goal. How is this done?

Maybe he is using ‘auto-ik’ feature that is there for such an eternity that everyone as forgotten about it (including me). That allow to manipulate a FK chain like an IK , but without pole target.
in pose mode , T pannel , option -> autoIK

Auto IK! Yes!

I bet that’s it. I just tried it and it does actually rotate the last bone as well as move the end’s position as if you had an IK goal. Good catch!

Nope, what he does, is he puts a fake IK,
an IK with no target that will stay in “red”.
What it does, is when you select the bone, it moves as an IK, but then it stores the keyframes as an FK chain, so when it interpolates it interpolates like fk while giving you the ease of an IK for posing.

Interesting. Thanks for the tip! So I tried it out and then tried the same thing with Auto IK. The results are the same. Auto IK Just makes straight rotation keys on the bones just like the target less IK constraint. Is there an advantage to using one method as opposed to the other?

It looks like IK without target allows to set chain length once.
With Auto-IK, you have to precise it with Ctrl Wheel or Ctrl page up or page down, each time bone is selected.

Exactly, i didn’t know you could specify the amount of bones to affect with auto-ik, I thought it was just not possible. In any case when you’re using a tablet to animate, anything that needs to be done with the mouse wheel is useless

BTW:

these 3 animations (and i got a couple more hidden) were done with rigs that were made with the Easy rigging concept, though they don’t have facial… A rig made with rigify (with facial) has roughly 700 bones, anyone wants to guess how many did this rig have?..

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Twenty ? Awesome little shorts by the way, love the comic reliefs. :slight_smile:

Thanks @hadriscus for the compliment =) I really enjoyed making them!

More like 95 bones… though still very little ammount… as a reference the rigs for the agent film are roughly around 2500 bones… per character.


This rig was developed by Daniel M Lara, for PepeSchoolLand’s MAN course, and I customised the character in for these 3 different pieces… though a great thing is that he teaches you how to easily build rigs like this, and it’s honestly super easy.

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This is why I love rigging in Blender. Even though we have no straightforward way of twisting an ikspline, we have the incredible simplicity brought by the different modes, the fact that every bone you set up is automatically zero-ed out, no need for offsets when constraining bones, etc - and that much already divides the amount of elements by five.

Hey by the way I see you’re in Barcelona, do you know of any jobs for animators/riggers ? I was there a while ago on vacation and thought of knocking on some doors to show my demo but ended up just vacationing. :slight_smile: I loved the city and the country though, so… wouldn’t mind staying some more.

Hey yes, when i understood what blender’s rigging system was all about i figured out that it would cut down my bone count and rigging mess by a lot, it’s a really well though of system to my belief.

Yes I’m living in barcelona now, It seems that people have jobs =), i’m a freelancer and I’ve got clients from outside barcelona, I haven’t got one here i really haven’t knocked many doors, just last week I started sending emails to companies, and 3 responded… in any case there are a couple of big companies mostly related to games if you’re into that: ubisoft, king, socialpoint, and a couple more, and then a bunch of smaller ones that do advertising and games aswel… so if you want there are jobs… i personally want to move out from here to madrid and get a job at a feature film studio… we’ll see how that goes.

If there’s anything i can help ya with let me know =)