armatures are the foundation of what animators used to animate their characters.
They are also known as rigs or skeletons
and like skeletons. Armature objects are made up of bones.
Bones are the individually moving parts of a skeleton or armature
that dictate where and how the skeleton can move
just like real bones in a real skeleton.
With armature objects we can create and edit bones
and then transform these bones to animate them.
Let's see how that works.
First things first
you can add armatures to your scene by going to the ad menu and selecting armature.
This will add an armature with a single bone.
The cube is a bit in the way so let's hide it for now in our outline. Er
For hot users you can also select the cube and press h. As in Hyde
with this armature object we have two modes other
than object mode that we can go into.
We can edit the bones by going into edit mode
and we can pose bones. In pose mode,
posing is where you'll be doing most of your bone animation as well.
You can enter both of these modes by going to the top left hand corner.
But for hockey users you can also press tab to toggle in and out
of edit mode and control tab to toggle in and out of pose mode.
But right now we only have one bone. So let's go into edit mode and change that
once we're in edit mode.
The bones that make up our armature object can now be edited.
This is very similar to how we edit vertex is edges and faces. For a mesh In edit mode.
Now a bone is made up of three parts
the head,
The body
and the tail.
The head is the base of the bone
and also its pivot point.
The tail is the narrower end of the bone and the body is the main body.
You can edit bones in three ways.
You can select and move both the head and tail of the bone individually.
Or you can select the middle of the bone and move, rotate or scale the bone as a whole.
Now that we know that I'm going to very quickly try to rig the spine of this character.
You can download this character
in the description down below.
Let's go ahead and add an armature object like we did before.
And then go into edit mode and drag the tale of our
bone all the way up to the top of his head.
If we want to add more bones, we can also do that in a number of ways.
Using the add menu at the top will add a new single bone,
not parented to any existing bones which you can then move wherever you want.
But if we want to attach it to our existing bone will have to parent one to the other.
Parenting plays a huge role in armatures and bone relationships
as it drives the foundation of how a rig moves
when we select our new bone and parented to our existing bone. In edit mode,
you'll find a few different options
connected
and keep offset
connected.
Will automatically move the entire child bone to the
location of the tail of the parent bone.
This is because connected bones must share a head and a tail.
This is great for bone chains like spines where the joints are perfectly shared.
However,
keep offset will ignore this requirement and
act similarly to how object parenting works
where transformation is inherited regardless of the
child's relative position to the parent,
this is great for ears or eyes where the pivot
of the deformation doesn't relate to the parents tail position.
Another way to create bones is to simply select a bone and subdivided.
This is done by using the right click context menu and selecting subdivide
this will turn your selection into a chain of connected bones.
As usual, you will have an operator panel appear in the bottom left,
that you can expand and adjust the number of cuts,
but you can also extrude new bones from existing bones by using the extrude tool.
This can be found in the left hand side quick tools
menu in the same way the extrude tool is used on measures
for hockey users, you can press E as an extrude as well in the same way
you can extrude bones from the head or the tail of a bone.
Make sure you have one or the other selected and use the extruder tool.
You can also extrude multiple bones depending on
how many heads or tails you have selected
bones created from extrusion are connected by default.
You can disconnect these bones by UNP Arent ng them
which can be done through the right click context menu,
going to parent and selecting clear
for hockey users. You can also press ALTs. P.
However, here we'll see two options pop up.
Disconnect will disconnect the bones allowing you to move them away
from the tail without affecting the bone it was connected to
but it will keep the bone parented to the other bone with an offset.
Does this sound familiar?
Well that's because this is the same state
as the keep offset option when parenting bones.
On the other hand,
selecting clear parents will disconnect and
sever the parent child relationship completely.
Another tool you can use from the toolbar is the role tool.
Bone roll dictates simply how a bone is rotated along its vertical axis.
This is typically its local y axis.
Why would you want to use the role tool?
Well assuming you have something simple like an elbow to the form and you know,
elbows only bend in one direction.
You would want that direction to be along an axis of rotation,
X, Y or Z.
To view the axis of your bones simply go
to the armature data tab of your properties editor
denoted by this green stick figure icon.
Then go to view port, display and check axis.
Suddenly all of your bones axes will become visible.
You can use the role tool by simply left click dragging anywhere in the view port
to rotate the axes of the bone to align with how you wanted to transform later.
You can also edit the role in the bone tab of the properties editor
denoted by this green bone icon
simply left click, drag the role value or left click tap and enter a number manually.
And the last bone editing tool you can select is the bone sized tool.
This is not the same as scaling the bone and you'll
notice that if you left click drag it doesn't do anything.
That's because these changes are only visible with a different bone display
simply go back into the armature tab of the properties editor
under view port display.
We can open this drop down to select different kinds of bone displays
for the bone sized tool to reflect any changes.
You'll want to choose either the B bones or the envelopes display.
Now when we left click drag this tool you can see the wit of our bone changing.
You can read more about what each of
these bone types do in the official documentation
which you can find in the description down below
but most of the time you can choose one based on preference.
I typically keep it on october federal but some
people prefer stick for example to simplify the visuals.
Now let's go ahead and talk about how to use these bones for animation
in order to do that. We need to understand how pose mode works.
Let's go into pose mode by either selecting it
from the drop down or pressing control tab.
This will then turn all of our selected bones blue
transforming a bone here will actually record location,
rotation and scale in the individual bone data
with this.
We can finally add key frames for these bones in
pose mode by right clicking and going to insert key frame
lock rod, scale.
This lets us animate
but you may have noticed that when we
move our bones are character still doesn't move.
So how do we make sure our bones actually move our character
in object mode, we can simply select the mesh shift,
select the armature object and opened the parenting menu either
through the right click context menu or control P.
You then might notice the option for armature
to form with three sub options below that.
The most commonly used one is with automatic weights as it gives us a great starting
point but feel free to read up on
the other two options in the official documentation.
Once we selected this,
you'll notice that when you transform individual bones,
each bone has been assigned a group of vertex is that will deform with it.
This is being handled by vertex groups also known as weights,
which have been automatically generated by blunder based on
the placement of the bones are relative to the mesh
will be going over vertex groups in a separate video.
If you select your mesh and go into its modifiers, tab denoted by the wrench icon,
you'll notice that it now has a new modifier as well.
The armature modifier.
This is how blender uses armature objects to deformed
mesh is based on the transformation of individual bones.
Now obviously this rig is incomplete and if you
want to learn how to rig the entire character,
you can head over to our character rigging video.
But I hope this gives you a good idea of how amateur objects work and how to edit them.