#rigging connor

1. How to navigate around blender

You can use those icons to navigate, but ideally you should be using an actual mouse and shortcuts. USE SHORTCUTS AND MOUSE, you’ll get used to it quickly:

The gizmo with XYZ to rotate around the scene. (shortcut: Middle mouse button + drag)

Hand icon to pan around without rotating (shortcut: Shift + Middle mouse button + drag)

magnifying glass to Zoom in and out (shortcut: mouse scroll wheel)

Okay, move around and get accustomed to it 

2. Different modes (Object/Edit/Pose)

There are different modes in blender for different purposes, but for working with rig you’ll be generally working switching between Pose and Object modes.

You can change them in the upper left corner of working area or by using Ctrl + Tab to switch between the three. One thing to note: what you see in mode menu depends on what object is currently selected. If you select a mesh, the menu will look differently and will feature a bunch of other modes like sculpt and different paint modes, but no Pose mode:

To see the Pose Mode listed you must select the armature object (the rig itself), here it is named Main_Rig and here it is selected as orange

After selecting it (check that you only select it and nothing else)

Oh, by the way

3. How to (de)select things in blender

It’s simple,

To select things you click on them with left mouse button

To select multiple things things you either click and drag left mouse button (LMB) with a box select or click on individual objects while holding Shift, or you can combine the two 

If you want to select everything (that is visible and not hided atm), press A.

If you want to deselect everything click on empty space on your scene or press Alt + A (or just click A two times quickly)

To deselect only some objects you could use Alt + Z to undo your last action (Ctrl + Shift + Z to redo it again) in case it was the last object you selected or you can use Ctrl + Left Click and drag to box select objects you want to remove from selection.

It is also handy to know how to invert selection aka select everything BUT a bunch of objects (Ctrl + I)

Maybe I’ll add more things to this list later, but you should be good to go with what is already listed.

Okay, back to the rig, select it and go to Pose Mode. Or wait, first, real quick about Object Mode

4. Object mode

Here you select objects and move/rotate/sclale(ooops! Careful here! Usually you don’t want to scale them in Object Mode and should use Edit mode instead, maybe later on I’ll explain why. In short - it can mess up the way things work)

4.1 Okay, Let’s move it

To move things around you select them first and then (Here I’ll deliberately ignore the existance of gizmos bc you should be using shortcuts, just believe me) you press G to move it freely around as it is following your mouse, click to fix it in new place or left click to reset the way it was before you decided to move it. Additionally, after pressing pressing G once you can follow it with X, Y or Z (you don’t need to press them at the same time, just one after another) to move it only along the way of one of those axis. This place here need a little further explanation about

4.1.2? The difference between Local vs Global transformation orientation  

They can be changed in upper middle part of the working area. Basically Global orientation means that if you move an object and will try to move them along some specific axis (X/Y/Z) they’ll move accordingly right-left/forwards-backwards/up or down, aligned with those you see in a gizmo in upper-right corner of the screen. But it’s not the only way you can move things. In case you have an object that is slightly rotated you may want to move them along it’s local position in space. This is actually a time where gizmos can help visually understand what I mean

Here I rotated a cube slightly from it’s original rotation, and if I use Global Orientation and will try to move it along one of the axis, it will move in one of those directions as shown by arrows in the first picture. As you can see, they are aligned with visual representation of those global axis (here X and Y) you can see as Red and Green lines

If I switch into Local orientation, you can see that now arrows are aligned not with the world’s Up-Down/Left-Right/etc but with what’s Up-Down/Left-Right RELATIVE TO THE OBJECT ITSELF. (Which btw is something you can change)

Okay, enough about moving things, now about rotating

4.2 Rotating things

To rotate them you press R to rotate it around. Double-Click R to rotate it freely around all axis or, just like it was with moving things only around certain axis you can also rotate them around certain axis (with R -> X(or Y or Z, or Shift+X/Y/Z to rotate around all axis but this one)). Same with Global/Local orientations, just imagine that those arrows in pictures above are a representation of around what line in space an object will rotate from it’s pivot point (represented by this orange dot. It can be moved around and shit, but maybe I’ll talk about it later). 

I could also mention that there are also different rotation modes like Euler/Quaternion and such a thing like Gimbal Lock, but those are some shit you encounter when you rig things and they start to spin not the way you want them to, driving you crazy about why isn’t this fucking shi-...nvm, moving on

4.3 Scaling shit

Press S to scale things. Just like before press S then X(Y or Z) to only scale them in one axis, or Shift+(axis of your choice here) to exclude it from the list of axis you want to scale it along. Here I should talk a bit about situations where you’re scaling a bunch of things at once and want to scale it relative to a specific point in space or use individual pivot points for each of the selected objects. You can change it here:  

I’m getting lazy, so I won’t be explaning it in details here, but just be aware that this menu exists. It is actually useful for rotating things as well, but I more often use it for scaling, so I forgot to mention it in rotating section

Okay, I think we’re done manipulating things, and we haven’t even got to the part when I talk about the rig I was supposed to be writing about on the first place SHIT I should have started explaining those concepts within pose mode right away, but huh, those concepts for manipulating things are interchangeable for moving bones or rig controllers, so no time were wasted here, it’s all the same, if you know how to manipulate object in object mode you’ll use the same exact shortcuts and do it the same way, it this sense blender is really consistent with it shortcut-usage and G is always for moving, R for rotating and and S for scaling, whether you are scaling objects, bones, controllers or graph handles or distance between keyframes or...list is long enough, you got my point.

How to reset position/rotation/scale

Let’s say you moved it in some ugly way and want to reset it back the way it was in its “default” position. For this you need to select the bones you want to reset (or just select everything with A) and press

Alt + G - to reset position

Alt + R - to reset rotation

Alt + S - to reset scale (although I don’t know why would you scale bones)

Bone Layers

For this specific model I used bone layers to separate bones into groups according to their purpose and/or layout. What it means is that rig is divided into a few categories that can be hidden/revealed for convenience.

Blender has a system of built-in layers for armature (32 of them in total), which looks like this

I marked “actual layers” with green, because those are the layers we actually use and so-called “pointlessly repeated layers” jare ust a mirror of those we have above for the purpose of locking them (to restrict any changes we could accidentally make), which if you ask me is fucking retarded, there are better ways to visually represent it 

Anyways, we can reveal what’s inside them by clicking on them (just ignore what’s in a purple box, pretend it doesn’t exist), we can select multiple of them by holding Sift or deselect by clicking on them again (while holding shift). White circles represent that the layer has something inside and isn’t empty. Filled white circle indicate that the active bone(s) (the one(s) we have selected atm) are inside this layer, or, if nothing is selected it means that the last time there were, it was on This layer.

As you can see, by default those layers look weird and there’s no way to name them, which kinda ruins the purpose of layers. That’s why we won’t use them, and instead use free plugin “Bone Manager”, if you have my blend file, you should have it working already and it looks like this:

You can already see right away how much more user-friendly it is, doesn’t even requires explanation, as you can see all you need to know intuitively. It’s basically all the same layers from before, but displayed like they were actually made for people. 

To see this window, you should be inside pose mode. From there you can find it in the left corner of the working area under the tab “Bone Layers” like you can see on the screenshot. If you don't see that, then hover your cursor above working area and click N on your keyboard to show/hide it (or find this small arrow and click on it)

In regards to this specific rig I used 19 layers in total, you can see all of them below. They were mostly made for my convenience while rigging although I tried to rearrange them in a way that would be convenient for posing

(you can rearrange them if you want, it doesn’t affect the way any of those bones function, it’s purely for visual representation)

About those layers in detail

“Face original controls” - as the name says, it’s face bones from original rig. Not all of them though, I put “Tongue”, “Lips Upper (orig)”, “Lips Lower (orig)” and “Eyelids_orig” on separate layers, although they are all technically just face original controls. You’ll probably struggle to see them if you try to switch to them now, but it’s because bones are displayed as barely visible wires atm, I’ll explain how to switch it to other types below. 

Other layers that contain original controls are

“Helper Deform (orig)” - those move small parts of the mesh, but I don’t think they’re really useful or helpful, more like confusing and messy. You can try tweaking them around, but I suggest to ignore this layer. This layer exists because I was afraid to delete something just to find out it was actually really important later on. Maybe those bones Are helpful, idk, try it.

"Tie”, “Jacket” and “Shirt” are also just original bones that are responsible for cloth. For now I don’t yet possess the kind of black magic wisdom it takes to know how to rig clothes in a meaningful way, so it’ll probably be a frustrating experience to try to manipulate those. 

“Some pointless garbage” - originals bones that were there, but doesn’t do shit. Ignore it.

“Face custom controls” - a set of controllers made by me in an attempt to make usable face rig. It’s not comprehensive and only have controllers for eyes, eyelids and eyebrows (I got frustrated about the state of the mouth and haven’t finished it. Eyes and eyelids requires improvements too, but huh, better than moving each individual bone from original rig, which btw you can still do instead of/in addition to using controllers) This layer looks like that:

For eye individual controllers you’d want to rotate them instead of moving (double-click R after selecting them to rotate freely)

I realise now that eyelids move a little too much along with the eyes. I didn’t know the shit I was doing when I started this mess, so I’d probably managed to do it better now if I were to do it again.

Eyelid(s) controls:

You’d think that they’re responsible for upper eyelids, but actually no, not exactly, instead they are linked to the action of closing/opening the eyes and as you can see, lower eyelid moves along slightly (just like it does in the game. I tried to replicate the way it happens)

I tried to do the lover eyelid controller at some point as well to allow for the squinting(there are also wrinkle maps for that), but it is one of those things I haven’t yet done after realising that it is easy enough to break those eyelids already as they are now...Maybe later

And finally, eyebrows, which are probably the most interesting and complicated piece of this rig as they’re the only controllers that I managed to actually link to dynamic wrinkle textures, the ones I can’t shut up about. Each of those controllers are, just like eyelids, linked to the action (frowning/rising eyebrows depending on if you move them up/down or left/right from the nose. Or you can actually do both and see in-betweens of all kind of mix of the two), you can see it more clearly as skin around the corners of the eyes moves slightly(up) as well when frowned. I can dedicate the whole other post explaining exactly how I managed to do that, there’s A LOT to say, it’s absolutely ridiculous how complex it is under the hood. I spent maybe a week researching dynamic-wrinkle concept in 3d and I still can’t wrap my head around how cool it is.

Okay, that’s all for the face. 

But before moving on, a few words about what I have already mentioned about how you can use original controls to achieve more/other face expressions and actually pose mouth that I completely abandoned for custom controls.

If you switch to one of those layers with orig. controls, you’ll see something like this:

You can see those tiny dots that indicate those controls, but maybe they’re too small to be seen easily.

For this reason, you can switch the way they look to something else, instead of wire, you can do it here (generally you’ll use Stick or Octahedral if not Wire, ignore others)

Below is an example of how it looks like when displayed as Stick. I added a custom bone for the jaw just so it’d visible at all times, so it won’t be affected.

Okay, moving on to those next layers 

Now finally about how we can move the body. For this purpose there are two different ways to bend those arms/legs and those are known as Forward Kinematics (often shortened to FK) and Inverse Kinematics (IK).

In this rig there are separate layers for them called

“FK CTRL” and “IK CTRL” , for forward and inverse kinematics accordingly.

Forward Kinematics is when you pose bones one after another in a rigid way. From bottom to the top. In this rig they are color coded with green.

Note: a little update made to the rig after those gifs were made — now finger bones are in the FK CTRL layer. Used to be on DEF layer before

Inverse Kinematic (IK) is the other way around - you move the last element of a chain and all the bones before that move accordingly. You can further adjust the position of the chain by using “pole target” (in the gif below you can see how it works. It help you rotate elbow or knee) I made IK controls yellow.

This rig is switched to IK by default, so if you try to move green bones of arms or legs it won’t move. I’ll explain fow to switch between IK/FK in a moment.

“Root“ layer contains two shapes. One of which is the circle around where the character stands on the ground - if you move that it’ll move the whole character

Another shape is the words “Some settings” above the head. If you click on those and go into item properties menu, you’ll see that there are a buch of switches there:

Eyes_Follow_Head - whether or not eyes move along with the head if you rotate it or stay focused on eye controller.

FK>IK_Hand_L - switch left hand from FK(if set to 0) to IK (if set to 1)

All the remaining ones are just the same, but for the remaining hand and legs.

Layer “Torso” is quite self-explanatory. Just move/rotate things around to understand what they’re doing and you’re good to go.

And...It seems like I’m forgetting something really important as if there’s a lot more to tell about, but HUH. I don’t remember what is it exactly and if I figure it out, I’ll update this post.

Oh, right, about other layers. Those are mechanical layers responsible for things to function properly and those layers aren’t intended to be touched so if you don’t know what you’re doing DO NOT TOUCH OR CHANGE ANYTHING in those layers. Which are “Eyelids”, “Follow-Eyelid”, “DEF”(this one contain original bones btw, but don’t touch it if you're tot sure), “MCH” and “IK”

Lemme know if you have any problems/questions/suggestions/fic recommendations or if you want me to ramble on about some specific thing in rigging(or 3d in general), like the way I made those controls for eyebrows, or how to create your own controllers. Or...you got the idea.