mm.
Mhm.
Hello,
this is juan Pablo pozo speaking and you're watching the
time lapse about Regan Vincent as you may already know.
Vincent is a free character that you can download
at the character library of the blender cloud.
It was originally designed by Matias Mendiola and it was modeled by Andy Karadzic
and then it was rigged by me Using Blend Rick five
blend rick five is a free adam that you can download at blender cloud or
you can also get the latest version at this address of kid lab dot com.
Once you download the zip file,
you can install blend rick by going to file user preferences.
Adams
insult from file, you select the zip file
and then you can enable the Iran
recently the pdf documentation about blend rig in which
you will find a step by step guide about how
to read a character from scratch with blend rig was
also made available for free on the blender cloud.
So you can read that pdf file to get a better idea of how the rig works.
And if you become even more interested in using blend work for your own projects.
You can also sign up to the blender cloud and there you will find several hours of
training material with many step by step guides about
how to read your characters with this rig.
Among other things
currently blend rig is only intended for film production but in the
near future I plan to do other presets of the rig.
Like for example a game engine ready rig, quadrupled rig and even some vehicles rig.
So stay tuned to any news about the blended project.
Now let's get our hands on Vincent first I'll
add the blending armature from the ad object menu
and then from the blended rigging panel I will enable the re proportioned mode
to retarget the rig.
In this mode you will get all the necessary controllers
in order to fit the armature to your characters.
So first I'll adjust all the controllers to the body of the character.
Just a quick note about the fingers.
Remember that blend rig has the option to have like a in the fingers.
So it is a good idea to place the fingers with a little
bit of initial inclination so that the IK knows where to bend to.
So then I'll go on with the head,
there is a face muscle controller that will let you adjust the whole face at once.
Here I'm just mirroring the post to start getting things in place,
blend rig has a facial rig based on bones.
So you don't have to rely on shape kids to
do the facial expressions of the characters and all the
mechanic of this facial rig is fully automated and it
will let you achieve any expression you can imagine.
So get in the face right on this first stage of the process. It's really important
as you can see the faces divided in different colors for each facial part so
that you can fit each part separately into your model without any visual hassle.
You can see what all these different bone colors are about in the bone groups.
List of the armature
Also,
it is a good idea when adjusting the face that you enable the B bones option
in the amateur so that you can see the actual curvature that the bones have.
All the deformation that the rig delivers is based on B bones.
So it is nice to know how the curvature of the bones is behaving in order
to make everything look as smooth as possible
and to avoid bone flipping or sharp edges
about the main facial rig.
I first adjust the lip controllers and then I adjust all
the outer controllers that's around the cheeks and the chin.
This is because all the intermediate controllers
will adjust automatically to these two ends,
the lips and the outer controllers.
So in other words, the rig kind of spreads from the lips to the outer face.
Then of course after doing this,
I'll manually tweak all the intermediate controllers too.
So after just in all the controllers, I can mirror the pose
and then I can start with the baking process when you add the blend rig armature,
you're not only adding that are mature but you
are also adding some lattices to the scene.
The measure from cage, which will deliver automatic body deformation
without any need of weight painting the character
in a low resolution model for creating low resolution proxies of your character.
So as you can see those models are already responding to
the newly adjusted proportions of the rig which now fit Vincent.
And what I will do is to first bake the meshes and I will beg the armature last.
So I pressed the bake mesh button in each mesh and then
I go back to the amateur and press the bake armature button.
Oh,
here I realized that I have forgotten to adjust
the hat and eyeglasses controllers of the Amateur.
So I adjust those controllers and then begged the amateur again.
Once the armature is baked,
I go into edit mode and I run a couple of operators First the fixed joints operator,
which will fix some minor errors that may occur
after the baking with the placement of the bones.
And then I run the cult rolls operator which will automatically
calculate the roll angles for all the bones in the armature.
Then I can go back into post mode and I can turn off the re proportioned mode
so now that all the objects of the rig are baked into the proportions of Vincent,
I can move on to adjusting the measure from cage
for doing that,
I will go into edit mode and I will start moving the verses
of the measure to form cage so that this object completely surrounds the character
needless to say is that if you do not want to use the measure form technique,
you can wait paint the character manually or you can do automated weights.
All of that is valid but blend re comes
with a measure from cage that is already waited.
And that has been constructed with many techniques that will ensure the best
possible deformation for those who don't know what measure for me is.
You can think of measure form as a customized.
Let is So this low resolution mesh will drive the deformation of the model.
But as it is a very simple mesh you can wait painted and add
shape keys and edited in a much easier way than directly editing the character.
Besides that measure,
the form will deliver an organic deformation that
no other method will be able to achieve.
So it is a very nice technique to use for organic characters.
Once I'm done editing the mesh I will add a measure
for modifier to the body and the head of Vincent.
And I will first bind this modifiers at level five.
This is because with precision level five measure
form will bind very quickly and I will be
able to check if all the verses of the model are moving along with the rig.
So as you can see here many verses have been
left outside of the calculation so I will unbind the modifiers
and I will edit again the measure form cage making sure
that all of those vortices are inside of the cage.
I will repeat that procedure until I get everything right.
So I bind modifiers again and check for loose versaces.
Okay now that all the character is moving along with the rig correctly,
I will unbind the modifiers for the last time and I will do the final binding
in precision level seven.
This can take several minutes and up to half an
hour sometimes but it guarantees a correct deformation after character.
So it is very important to do the final binding
at level seven.
Here I am taking the out of the box deformation and you
can see it's pretty decent but as this is the main character,
I will pay a lot of attention to details when it comes to deformation.
In the blender cloud tutorials.
I talk about ways of how to speed up this process
for secondary characters using deformation
enhancer modifiers and other techniques.
So if you're interested in that you can check
out the training material on the blender cloud.
Although in the ways that I do things I usually take the time to
treat all the deformation manually in order
to have complete control over the process.
So here I am adding sub served modifier studio objects and
I'm adding a driver to the view port subdivision level so
that I can control the whole subdivision of the character from
the model resolution property that is on the blend rick panel.
After doing that I'm going to go joint by joint checking
how deformation is doing in each part of the body.
Here I'm just tweaking some IK parameters so that the knee can fully extend.
And here I found out that the joint of the thigh and the pelvis was kind of too low.
So I'm going into re proportioned mode again and I'm
hiring that joint and I bake the rig once more.
So basically what I'm doing now is the first deformation pass.
So in this first pass I basically use three factors.
The geometry of the measure form cage.
And that is if I see that the influence
of the measure form cage isn't working that great.
I may need to unbind the modifier to eat the geometry
of the measure form cage and then bind the modifier again.
And this is because as I said earlier,
blend which measures the form cage is built up with many
topology techniques that deliver a better deformation out of the box.
So the relation between the model and the edge loops of the measure
form cage is really important in order to get a good deformation.
The other deformation factor that I take into account in this
first pass are the deformation helper bones and these bones which have
the suffix fix are placed in each joint of the armature
and they move away from the joint when the joint rotates.
So these bones greatly improved volume preservation.
So as you can see here,
I'm also tweaking the weight painting of the deformation bones over the
measure form cage so that everything looks as best as possible.
The other thing I do with the deformation helper bones is to
change their behavior by slightly tweaking
the values of their transformation constraints.
That way I can make them move more or less according to the needs of that joint.
And finally the third thing that I use for correcting deformation
in this first pass is to use the parameters called realistic joints
in blend rick.
These parameters let you simulate the actual volume of
real life bones because in many cases real life
bones not only rotate but they move in a
noble fashion along the head of the neighboring bones.
So this realistic joint parameter lets you simulate that and it is
another great way to help in volume preservation when the rig articulates.
Well here I'm going to add some edge loops to the measure form cage in the area of the
belt of the character so that I can see if I can make the built the form in a less
rubber like way when the character moves the pelvis.
So by adding more edge loops and by modifying a bit weight painting,
I will try to make the belt look more rigid
so well I'm glad with how to build the forms now
and I'm going to check the remaining parts of the body
here,
I'm going to set up some automated movement
parameters that can be found in the rigging panel
and these parameters you can basically set how
the shoulder behaves when the arm moves in.
Ik so the shoulder kind of follows the arm automatically when it moves.
You can also set up the behavior of the foot roll which you
can set to roll from the hills to the tip of the food.
And you can also set how the spine
behaves when you rotate the master spine controller.
The good thing about MR form is that the
deformation of the cage doesn't have to be perfect.
The cage can have intersections that may not look 100% correct.
But the important thing here is that the character itself, the forms correctly.
So if you think of MR form as a kind of lattice,
you can understand that the main objective of the deformation of the message.
To form cage is to pull and push the verses of the main character.
As this model won't mimic the deformation of the mess uniform cage,
but instead it will be influenced smoothly and organically.
So the good news is that we don't have to care about the deformation of the MR from
cage be imperfect because the important thing here is
how the character is deforming under domestic from cage.
And in most cases that will be smoothly and organically
and it will let you achieve deformations that you would
just not be able to achieve with other methods.
Once I have done my best tweaking the deformation with the amateur.
The second deformation past will be adding corrective shaped keys
in those places that I was not able to achieve a
perfect deformation just with the MR form cage and the armature.
So I moved the character into critical poses
and then I add the shaky to correct the problematic deformation.
Remember that in the pdf documentation and in the
step by step tutorials of the blender cloud.
I explain which bones you have to use in each body part in order to drive the shape keys
in those tutorials. I also show how to easily set up the drivers
as you can notice it is very easy to edit the shaking of the measure form cage
and you can see how the deformation is
improved in real time over the characters model.
So once I'm done with the shaky I mirror it and I also copy the
driver but then I changed the target bone of the driver from left to right
in the area of the elbow.
I ended up using three different shape keys to drive the
motion of the sleeve of the shirt when the forearm rotates.
So here I made it in the curves so that the shape is
overlapped with each other a bit in order to make the motion look right
and then I just mirror the shape keys to the other side.
So I go checking joint by joint. Now with the torso
here I will duplicate the MR form cage because I want the deformation of the neck
of the character to be independent from the deformation of the neck of the shirt.
And for that I need another MR from cage.
So one MR form cage will deform the shirt of the character and the
other MR Form cage will deform the head and neck of the character.
I will get rid of unnecessary geometry
because this master Form cage will only influence
the head model.
So I will assign this new measure form cage to the measure for modifier of the head.
And then I'm going to bind the modifier again.
So I will duplicate the bones of the neck of the amateur.
And then I'm going to erase all the constraints
that make these bones rotate with the head.
Then I will assign this new bones to the measure form cage that deforms the
shirt and in this way I'm making the shirt independent from the head rotation.
So as this is a separate MR form cage,
I can also add extra controllers to deform the neck of the shirt.
Here I am just editing the shirt model so
that it overlaps with the neck of the character.
And we don't see a gap between the two models.
And of course with any change that you make to the geometry.
You have to re bind the measure for modifiers
here.
I will add a shape key to correct the intersection between the shirt and the neck.
In this extreme post
here I will just duplicate the buttons of the shirt of the character
and I will parent them with vertex parenting to the mesh of the shirt.
This way I prevent the bottoms to squash and stretch with the motion of
the body as they do if they are deformed by the mestre form cage
here I'm adding some corrective shape is to the
bottoms objects so that they don't intersect with the shirt
and after doing some tests I will just leave three verses from the
regional bottoms in the shirt model and I will verdicts parent the bottom objects
to these three virtues is
so far we've seen that measure Form works great for the body but when
it comes to small areas or rigid areas messed reform doesn't do that will
so
in those cases we will use the armature modifier to the form the model
and that is
the head.
The hands with the fingers and the fit if the character has toes.
In this case the character doesn't have toes. So we will use the mesh the form forfeit
but not for the hands and head. So now I'll add an armature modifier to the body model.
And as the measure of this character is based on victor from cosmos laundromat.
The geometry already has the verdicts groups.
So what I'm going to do is to just check how it performs
out of the box and I'll make some corrections if it is necessary
here I'm just tweaking a bit the position of the wrist joint
and here I noticed that the bone of the forum and of
the hand are separating too much because of the realistic joint parameter.
So I will lower the risk value in the realistic joint step.
So here I'm modifying the weight painting of
the no mdf group which divides the influence of
the armature modifier and have to measure for modifier
by smoothing out the limits of this group.
You cannot blend the influence of both modifiers
here I'm enabling the bone rolls layer which will allow
me to modify the roll angles of the whole armature.
And after tweaking the roles of the bones of the fingers,
I'm going to run the customer lines operator which will align all
the bones of the amateur to the bones of this layer.
So by editing these bones, you can easily customize the roles of the whole armature.
So I'm going to check how the hand is deforming and as I did with the body.
I'm going to move the fingers into extreme pulses and check the
deformation there because if the deformation is correct in the extreme post,
it will most likely be correct in the intermediate poses.
Again,
you see that I'm not only tweaking the weight painting of the main bones of the
fingers but also off the deformation helper bones
of each of the joints of the fingers.
This way I maintain the volume of the joint as I need
Here, I am checking that all the weights have been mirrored correctly.
And here I added a corrective smooth modifier to the model of the body.
Just to enhance the deformation of certain parts of the model.
For isolating the influence of this modifier.
I create a new verdicts group called corrective smooth.
And when I paint that verdicts group you can see
the influence of the corrective smooth modifier in that area.
The corrective smooth modifier is a kind of
deformation enhancer modifier because it tries to preserve the
smoothness of the surface while also keeping the
details of the original model in rest pose.
So you don't have to make abuse of this modifier but for doing subtle corrections.
It is a great addition to blender
here.
I'm just testing how the corrective smooth modifier works in different areas.
But finally I only used it in wrists
and now I will improve a bit the deformation of the thigh
when it goes up so I will tweak the shape is involved.
Well now we are done with the body so I will move on to the face.
Mhm