layers, bone groups and shapes - The SECRETS of BLENDER's RIGIFY: Part 5! - [Blender 2.8]

Hi, I'm Luciano and welcome to the Adventures of Lollipop Man. As we approach the end of the series, we are going to final our rig by setting up the layers in a way that's actually useful. We're going to modify the shapes of the controllers. So they fit the character a little bit better. Don't get in the way so much and we're going to fix the coloring as well of the rig and that's it. We can call this a done rig. So yeah, let's pick it up where we left last time and let's get onto it. Here is my scene. Uh, as you see with the animation that I had done, I hope you like that. I'm going to go to layout. I'm going to get away from the character a little bit. I'm going to hide the cinematography stuff because I don't need it. Select my rig. Uh, I don't care about the animation. Stay there. Uh, all I want now is my meta rig and I want to explain a few things about the rig. I'm going to show you all the layers that we have right now. And, and so we have a few issues here that I like to deal with beforehand, before creation of the rig. First of all, something that's really clever about Rigify is that the bone groups, they changed the color for the active bone and for the selected ones that are not the active ones and they've unified them by default in the entire rig. And then you get one color, no matter what controller you select for the active and the one and one for the selected, but they're not active. The only thing that they didn't think about is that the active one really is so similar to the selected ones that are not active, that it's actually really hard to tell which one is the active. And so that's something that we're going to fix in the meta rig, because if we do it in the meta rig, then I can save the meta rig, apply it to another character and it will still stay. Another issue is that the layers, the setup of the layers that they have, there's too many, it's too convoluted. We have two tweaks for the legs, two tweaks for the arms, tweaks for the fingers, tweaks for the torso, face primary, secondary and, and something, something. And if you look at the face, for instance, let's, let's just take a hard close look. The face controllers by default really are useless. Like honestly, you only need these ones, this one and the eyelids and, and the basic of the eyebrows to give a general expression. But why do I want to see the teeth at this point? Why do I want this at this point? Why do you even want the ears? Like, it's not like anybody I think would touch the ears on a blocking stage. So you need to think of it as stages. You're going to go from general to particular. And I think most animators try to go from the major part of the pose on the general silhouette, the general idea of the shot towards the little details, because to change stuff becomes super complicated. And so let's go to the second and you get the face primary. Yeah. The face primary sounds kind of accurate. This one is like really not that important there. That should probably go here in the secondaries and the secondaries. This is fine. This is, this is completely fine. So we're going to make sure that face primary and face are going to be the one layer and face secondary. It's going to be a tweak. Then this is fine. This guy here, they, we need to fix these shapes. So there are a little bit more user-friendly. I would say the neck is humongous controller. We don't need something so big. The head, it needs to be kind of like this one, like a square that covers the head. So it's easy to pick it up. Then the torso, the torso here, um, it's great because we have this IKFK, which is both at the same time. I really like it because it lets you work with FK to do the main motions. Say, yeah, you get that right. So you get to do the main things in FK how they they're supposed to work. But then if you need to, you can still use your IK to do tweaks and stuff like that. So it's, it's, it's really, really nice. And then you get this one and then you get that one, which is a little bit more located there in the, in the bottom part. As you can see, this one works like that. And then you get this one that pivots from there from the middle. So it's good stuff. But what we need to do is these ones call them, uh, put them in the torso because they work so seamlessly together that you don't need to be switching them from one to the other one. And then these things here, these are tweaks. Those are the ones that you want to move to the tweak layer for sure. So I think I'm going to do it like then the fingers, we don't want to be turning on and off fingers separately. The fingers should appear with the, with the arms, no matter what. These ones are tweaks. So they should go on a tweak layer with all the rest of the tweaks. When we got IK, FK here, we cannot do much. Uh, the way the rig is built doesn't do it automatically. To me, we will have arm left, arm, right, leg, left, left, right. When you switch from IK to FK, it would just turn on one and turn off the other one. And we wouldn't need to change layers, but it's not built like that. And then arm tweaks, same thing, tweak layer and so on. I think, I think that's, that's a good plan. And then coloring wise, we're going to basically maintain the same colors. We're going to make them a little bit more poppy, but we're going to reorganize the color. So we're going to have, this is left, right. This is going to be red and this is going to be blue. This is like this blue. And then the center is going to be yellow. And then we're going to get tweaks in say green. And then what are we missing? The extras in some kind of purple, or orange, orange, orange, and the purple stays for the root. And that's fine. So yeah, let's do this. Let's do this. First of all, we're going to go and select the meta rig. We're going to turn off our rig layer for now. And I'm going to show you what this entails. I'm going to select the rig. I'm going to go to post mode because in post mode we have the rig types. And as you remember, the rig types are really important because they define some properties. And along with those properties, they also say where are going to be the layers for the secondary bones that are going to be created. So if the arm has FK and IK, like it says here, you will get the arm that you already put in one layer, which is going to be the IK original. Then it will create the FK chain and we'll put it in this layer that it's mentioned here. And then the tweaks that it's doing, it's also going to put it in some other layer. And so this way, we can tell it right away where every single part needs to go. So first step, if we're going to go back to our armature and we're going to uncover these two things. So we've got bone groups and then bone groups. Yeah. Those are the Rigify bone groups, which is good. And the Rigify layered. So first of all, we're going to modify the bone groups towards what we said. So root, and then we're going to call this left center, right tweaks. And we have one more and we've got the extras there. So we're going to make them more saturated so we can actually see them properly. So I'm just going to go into each color and then I go saturation and value. That way, the colors that we'll get will pop much more from the screen than what we have. And then we're going to separate these two a little bit more. This is the active bone and the selected, but not active. So I'm going to make this a little bit more cyan. And this is going to be like white and that, and then we need to apply this to all of them. So apply. And now they get it. That's fantastic. We leave that untouched for now. And then we go to our layers. The layers are basically a representation of these layers and the order is like this one to 16, one to 16, and then 17 till 32, 17 to 32. And so we need to put the bones in the layers that we want them to be as a base. So first of all, we're going to rename the layers towards the ones that we said that we wanted to have. So we're going to have face and then nothing, arm L and then arm R and then torso. And then goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. And then leg L, leg L, leg R, leg R. And then goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. By the way, I'm hovering and hitting backspace. And then we'll go tweak extras. Uh, do we need something else? I don't think we do. Now we got face, arms, torso, legs, tweaks, extras, and then the root and then the other, and then we're going to click and drag. And just now when you release, you can press zero and then they're all zero. And same thing with these guys here, they can drag zero enter. Now we're going to reorganize our rig. And first of all, the face we want it to be color yellow. So we're going to look here in the bone group, which is related to this. So the face, the center is three. So three, and everything that goes in the center is three. So center, center, and that's it. And then we want to go left number two. And then those are the colors that we're going to assign to each layer. Now we need to move the bones to the appropriate layers. So I'm just going to turn on all these layers by holding shift and clicking all of them. And then these guys should go to layer number two, because we're gonna, we're gonna assume they're all IK. And then the FK gets created. So that makes it easier to think about them. So this one's go to layer. So this one's go to layer two. There you go. This one's go to layer four, one, two, three, four. Now, if I turn them on and off, face, arm, the other arm, nothing, which is good. Arm, other arm, torso, leg IK, leg IK, twigs which don't exist yet and extras, which don't exist yet. And of course, we didn't put anything, do anything here. As you can see, UI row is the order by what we did. They should probably be all in the one line. So basically it's telling it how they're going to be in which row they're going to be. So we, if you put two in the same row, it's going to put one on the second and whichever one comes first in order of layer, it will go in the left side and then from left to right. So we're going to do this one in number one, this one should be number two and R should be number two. And then FK should be number three. And then this one should be number three. So now you get it. You get left, right, IK, and then left, right, FK. We're getting there. It's, it's getting super close. Now we need to go to the rig types. I'm going to delete this guy here, annotations, goodbye. We need to go to the rig types and tell the rig types, which are the twig layers and the FK layers. Instead of just going around, I'm just going to create another panel here, select the bone. And remember to see the rigify type panel, you need to be in post-mode and, and obviously in the, in the bone that has the property. So for instance, the left arm, which is this, the one, the upper left arm, the one that I have selected right now, it's bones are in this layer, which is layer number two. And then this one, it's going to create the FK bones. And we want those in layer number three going to go down here and go FK and tell it there. And the twig layers, we know it's layer number 11. So we're going to go eight, nine, 10, 11. So we know every twig, twig bone we wanted to go into this layer. So I'm going to go one by one while the video goes faster. Okay. Uh, that should be, uh, all the assignments of the bone layers correctly. We're only missing one thing is that when we turn on and off the arms, we want the finger bones to stay in both IK and FK. And so for that, we're just going to unselect everything else. Keep only selected the fingers, uh, not the hand palm control, but only the fingers. We're going to press M or we can just go here in the, in the bones themselves in the bend relations. I think it is. Yeah. And we know that they are right now in number two, but we want them to be number two and number three at the same time. So if any of both layers are on the finger should be showing. And to do that, we can shift click here and we'll add it. And then right click copy all to selected. And so that means that every single one of these bones is there same on the other side and we need to select an active one. And then we want them in both layers, that one, uh, four and five, four and five. And so you could do M here and then shift click, and then that will be for both for all of them. And that works. Let's do it again. Let's remember to turn on the rig. And now let's generate the rig again. There we go. So now we got a nicely ordered set of layers, right? This is very cool. Uh, where is the rig? Okay, there we go. So we're going to hide our metarig so it doesn't bother us. And then I'm going to turn that subdivision level down. So everything is fast and nice. So we got face, we got arms, we got torso, we got legs, we got tweaks, and we got the root. Fantastic. We go into the edit and to post mode and you see we can, we have all of these guys and mostly, honestly, why do I want to differentiate with the colors? Uh, IK from FK. You don't need that because it's either going to be one or the other one. And also since we have the snaps, you really don't need to differentiate them. So cool stuff. So now we have our really nice armature. You can see if I turn the basics of the face, the face, now we actually can post the minimum of the face and get an idea of what that face is going to be doing. Um, otherwise we just turn it off, right? Cool. So as a final step, we want to modify some of these shapes. And basically these shapes are geometries that are lying around in the scene and they're just hidden. So we don't see them, but it's really easy to go and edit them. Um, Rigify does a really good job and it puts it in the same organization that the armature. So I'm going to hide our rig and I'm going to go here where it says widgets and to turn this on, it's quite hidden. You just have to go here and go to this little guy and now we get that little screen. And now when I turn on that screen, you can see we have like a black and white version of all of those shapes. Some of them are floating right now for some reason. Um, but the ones that we care about, they're all in place and they're all with black lines that are barely readable. Thank you theme. Anyways, I'm going to try to make them as decent as possible. So I'm going to change the head. As I said before, I'm going to go to edit mode and I select shift S and with the cursor to select it, put the cursor there. I'm going to delete this and create a cube. I'm going to scale the cube down to that position, lower it and then look from it from the side, press X and delete only the faces. And then I'm going to get this. I'm going to change again to vertices. I'm going to turn on x-ray so I can grab them all for sure. Move them back a little bit. And then it looks like a proper thing. I'm going to scale it from the sides. So it's a bit nicer. It gives us a, an idea of direction of where the character is actually looking at. So I'm just going to do that here to X and then again from the right. So it's kind of like an, like a little bit of an arrow. It will inform our brains a little bit of where the character is going. It's pointing to. When you finally get to something that you're happy with, you can be call it done and then go back. So we go to a rig turn again, your rig on selected. You're going to see that your shapes are already part of the rig. And it's because there's this live connection all the time between those shapes and the rig. And it's funny because they're live, but if you delete them, it's not a problem. They still stay stored in the file with the rig. So yeah, now I got all of the controllers that I need. Yeah. I can turn off the face and I'm ready to start my blocking. We're going to call this done. If you have more questions, bring them to me. I know I owe somebody adding an extra piece to the rig, but we'll leave that for a specific video on that. So hope that it wasn't too boring and that you get some of our t-shirt. Remember to like, and subscribe and see me next time.