Characters
Einar
Demeter Dzadik
Publisher
Einar is an Icelandic tinkerer who created his own home, clothes, and even his robotic left arm, out of scavenged scrap materials. He is the protagonist of the open movie Charge, and the Studio's first attempt at creating a realistic character. And now, he's all yours!
This character requires at least Blender 3.5, and WILL NOT WORK on lower versions! Grab it here!
Notes on how to use the character
- Put your 3D cursor in the Origin of your scene. Choose File > Link and browse the character file
- Go to the Collections and select CH-einar. Make sure "Instance Collections" is enabled. Press Enter.
- The Collection should appear instanced in the Viewport. Select it.
- Choose Object > Library Override > Make.
If you have run into any problems, let us know in the comments below.
The character is free to use, provided that the you respect the CC-BY license and include the credit: Einar Rig © Blender Foundation | studio.blender.org
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23 comments
I'm curious, what specifically requires 3.5 for the character? Some new upcoming feature with geonodes or rigging or something else?
@Lee Dempsey Also curious about this - would be helpful to understand the feature progression being used in these characters!
@Jon Not too sure what you mean by feature progression, but we always use the latest daily Alpha version of Blender during production, so if there's ever any new bleeding edge stuff that we can make use of, we do.
@Demeter Dzadik Thanks for the reply. I just didn't realize you used the latest dev versions as a rule vs selecting a version specifically for features you needed. But now that I think about it, that makes sense as the open movies are used to push development forward
@Lee Dempsey I believe we're using some new GeoNode nodes, yes.
how do you move the head?
@Landon Mayhan Try the other rig layers.
@Demeter Dzadik I also can't find the way to control the limbs etc. I did try to find the controls, but I'm very new to the layer system and the only head like controls I could find completely distorted the head, when I tried rotating them. There are also some controls in the Animation tab onscreen that lets you show and hide different ones, but I'm not sure how to operate them.
@Sander de Regt All the limbs should be set to IK mode when you open the file, and the IK controls are the yellow and green controls on the first layer. You should be able to just grab and move things on that layer for the basic controls that you might expect.
@Demeter Dzadik I can't seem to find how to move the head?
@lachie snell Try enabling other bone layers, or pressing Alt+H to unhide bones! (Shouldn't be hidden by default though, but just in case.)
Just a little thing I noticed recently after opening the file using 3.5 alpha The rig just breaks. I tried it with earlier experimental version of 3.5 and it kind of works again. Just want to inform this so maybe the issue could be check.
@B3dtest This sounds like an issue with Blender itself, you should report it on developer.blender.org! :)
Hi i am getting the library poses if i open the rig file . but i am not seeing any library poes when i link the character . any step am i missing ?
@Gokulnat You can either link or append the poses separately, or add the source file to your asset library paths in your user preferences.
Would love to see something like the BlenRig Picker on the characters with the CloudRig. Any chance of this happening?
@John H This would really have to be a native Blender feature to be useful and pleasant, imo. But I'd rather see a system for allowing animatos to click on the mesh to manipulate bones, and I think that's more likely to become a reality sometime in the future.
The hair shader is incredibly complex. I've been trying to break it down to see the thinking behind the process. Did you record the creation of this and the thinking behind it?
@Wayne Batchelor I don't have a breakdown anywhere unfortunately. A lot of the complexity just comes from layering different effects. The principled hair shader only works in Eevee, so we had do make a custom alternative that works with our rendering/lighting conditions. Other than that it's mostly about making a natural color map that adds randomness and variation along the hair curves based on a painted image texture. And then adding dirt and blood on top, in line with the distress stage. I hope that clears things up a bit!
Awesome work, it's great to be able to looks through this file. Did you use Blender to bake the displacement maps? I have found it difficult to bake accurate disp maps, do you have any suggestions? Particularly around the eyelids, I find it doesn't displace like a vector displacement map.
@Michael VaughanYes, that was all done within Blender. However, not everything with the out-of-the-box tools. Julien wrote extensively about the whole workflow in this training how we overcame some of the issues. For baking accurate maps we took some help using geometry nodes for example.
@Simon Thommes Thank you, this is super helpful. With the vector version of the GN, did you ever get half the mesh of random faces that bake with a plain vector gradient, but the other half bakes correctly?
@Michael Vaughan Hm, no. But are you sure that topology and UVs of the source and target mesh are matching exactly?