Beyond the Basics

By now, you should have all the knowledge needed to make basic rigs – from preparing the mesh, adding bones, and weight painting to custom handles and shape keys. This book has covered the very basics of rigging, while shape keys, constraints, and custom handles hint toward further development.

This chapter will touch on the further development of your rigging skills, showing what’s possible with more advanced techniques. These examples will not contain explicit instructions but just the bare-bones information you need to replicate them. If you see something you like but can’t figure out how to replicate it, then the final rig with these features will be made available for you to take a look at. If it’s not on the rig, then a quick Google search will lead you to a guide, as rigging is well-documented online.

Important note

This chapter focuses on many constraints, and any constraint can and will interfere with other constraints...

Wrist bone twisting

A very common problem you might have with the rig is the exceptionally poor deformation of the wrist. While this can be fixed with shape keys, you may find that you are not able to use shape keys due to other limitations (pipeline, game engine, render engine, export/import restrictions, and so on). Figure 8.1 shows before and after adding a wrist twist:

Figure 8.1 – Wrist twist

In Figure 8.1, you can see that the top hand has terrible deformation at the wrist, while the bottom hand spreads the twist out along the forearm, just as our arms do.

The next screenshot shows how the bones are set up and the constraints used:

Figure 8.2 – Wrist twist setup

Let’s look at this in more detail.

The yellow bone is the IK target. The green bone is a new bone used for the wrist twist setup.

The green bone is parented to the forearm, with a Copy Rotation constraint targeting the hand at a...

Topology in deformation

The topology of a model greatly affects its deformation. While this leans more toward modeling rather than rigging, it can be really helpful to know that there are ways of achieving better deformation that you might not have expected. Figure 8.3 shows some good basic examples of how different topologies can affect the result of the deformation:

Figure 8.3 – Basic topology, deformation silhouettes

The next screenshot, Figure 8.4, shows a potential solution to achieve decent deformation on a bend:

Figure 8.4 – Common topology for bends

You can mix these examples (and many other ideas) to combine their effects, and an experienced artist can integrate these basic principles into a dense and complex model.

Sore spots such as elbows and knees are prime contenders for topology bends, but you need to be expecting issues in advance of making the character because it affects the way the model...

Bendy bones

Blender has two types of bones: normal and bendy. In this book you have been using normal bones because there has been no need to use anything else. Bendy bones are great for making whacky and wild rigs, most typically found in lighthearted animated films where the characters do not conform to the logic of real life.

Figure 8.5 shows everything needed to turn a bone into a bendy bone; add some IK to the end handle and it’s simple!

Figure 8.5 – Full bendy bone setup

All the information you need to replicate each example is in these figures, so should you ever need to come back for ideas, you can take a quick look.

Figure 8.6 – Full bendy bone setup

A control rig for a bendy bone can consist of a Stretch To constraint with a disconnected target. Figure 8.6 shows a simple setup.

There’s also a Spine IK constraint; it’s pretty similar to the other IK constraints you have used...

Damped Track

Damped Track is great for making one bone point toward another. I find placing a Damped Track constraint on the head is always a good idea; it’s a simple constraint but an exceptionally effective one. Figure 8.7 shows a Damped Track constraint in action:

Figure 8.7 – Damped Track

Damped Track can be used for many different things, mostly when pointing at an object.

A surprise place you can use Damped Track is in a tail!

Model a simple tail and place a chain of bones in it. I used automatic weights just to keep it quick (great when it works).

Figure 8.8 – Damped Track in a tail setup

Each bone in the chain has a Damped Track constraint that targets the bone above it; it’s as simple as that, but grab the base bone and rotate it to see how impressively effective the result is! Note the Influence value; the stronger the value, the stronger the effect.

This lets you put the base...

Add-ons to expand your toolbox

Everything discussed in this book has been part of the default Blender experience. While Blender manages to cover such impressive depths, add-ons can completely change how you approach rigging.

Admittedly, some of these add-ons may do you more harm than good (Auto-Rig add-ons come to mind), but there are a few that are genuinely great. A few personal favorites are as follows:

• Wiggle Bones: Assign a bone to be a wiggle bone, then animate any bones above it; this add-on gives set bones a nice touch of physics. It leans more toward animation but it’s a fantastic tool to know about, just in case someone asks for a rig with little stringy things that need to jiggle (or not so stringy).
• Bone Manager: Assigning bone groups can be a little unsightly. All of those dots in the Layers grid just look daft, right? Bone Manager adds a new UI where you can name bone groups and even add scene controls to switch selected bone groups on the fly. Animators...

Summary

This chapter has been all about expanding your newfound skills in rigging, from Blender’s own included tools to add-ons that can change how you think about rigging. There are plenty of professional riggers out there who are sharing even more tips and tricks on the internet. Seeing what others are doing and how they go about their work is the best way for you to learn and grow in any skill, so make sure you are keeping your eyes peeled for anything rigging-related out there.

By this point, you have covered everything you need to know to give life to mesh – from the humble beginnings of an empty scene and working with mesh to adding armatures and then bones in Edit mode. You know about parenting mesh to bones and how that relationship works, using weights to bind vertices to bones. You furthered your skills by using the weight painting tools to precisely paint weights, adjusting both weights and bone positions while pushing your work into stress poses that show...