Animation Guides
Using the rigs, using cloudrig, animation tips and tricks, general blender usage, and best-practices.
The Rig UI
Currently we use CloudRig to build our rigs. CloudRig offers a lot of flexibility in setup, but also forces certain things to behave a certain way. Contact me (Wyatt) if there's something that feels wrong or you would like improved. Depending on what it is, we might be able to adjust it.
CloudRig documentation: studio.blender.org
CloudRig Download: CloudRig — Blender Extensions
Default Rig View (Main):
The Main bone group for the rig includes the most-used controls for body mechanics. This is a simplified view which should allow you to do 80% of the animation you need to do with a character.
Context Sensitivity:
Cloud rig has an optional toggle for context-sensitive menus. IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED TO TURN THIS ON!!
Bone Groups:
Bone Groups can be toggled by clicking them in the CloudRig sidebar.
Bone Groups are hierarchical, meaning that invisible groups will collapse down to save space.
IK/FK Switching:
When you select an IK or FK bone, options for IK/FK switching will appear in the menu.
After adjusting the slider, select the IK or FK bone and you may see new options appear. For example, the IK options are below.
- FK/IK Switch
Switches between IK and FK - Use Pole Vectors
Toggles the IK mode between Pole Vectors and IK Masters. This should be set BEFORE you begin animating. - IK Stretch
Allows the limb to be pulled past its maximum realistic distance - Parent Switching
Slide or press the hamburger menu to change the parent of the selected bone.
Note: To bake animation from IK to FK or vice-versa, press the hamburger menu. - IK Pole Follow
Force the Pole Vector to be parented to the Hand or Foot controller.
Hierarchy of Detail
Most Bone Groups follow a hierarchy of detail. The levels are as follows:
- Master
- macros and bones that otherwise control large areas. The top level bones - Main
- bones you'll interact with 90% of the time - Detail
- bones that affect a very small area, and/or are meant to simulate muscle or help define silhouette - Stretch
- bones that adjust the cartoony stretch of a limb or area - Micro
- bones that affect only a couple vertices
Not every Group will have all of these layers. Some Groups may have special layers.
For example: The Torso Group has a "Pivots" section, which contains multiple extra layers of Torso Roots, as well as a COG offset "Pivot" bone.
Physics
The physics chains are mean to be used with an addon such as GooPhysics or Bone Dynamics.
The purple "PSX" bones are meant to be simulated. After simulation, use the blue FK bones to adjust and fix collisions/look. You can also use the green Stretch bones as additional tweaks.
Animating Props
These are prop bones:
These two boxy bones at the base of the rig are Prop bones. They have a parent-switching property on them to make it easy to pick up and hold objects.
The bones can be revealed in the UI by turning on the Props visibility toggle under Extras:
How to pick something up:
Align the Prop bone with a prop that you want to control.
In this example, I snap the 3D cursor to the Suzanne's origin, and then snap the prop bone to the cursor. You can access this pie menu by holding Shift+S. Alternative search (F3) "snap" or "cursor".
Next, with the prop object selected, add a "Child Of" constraint targeting the Prop bone you want.
Press "Set Inverse" if the transforms get skewed.
Now the prop object will go wherever the Prop bone goes. It will also follow it through Parent Switching.
Adding this Child Of constraint should be done BEFORE you animate. The parent switching system in the character rig itself is meant to handle all of the parent switching necessary for a shot.
You can still do whatever you want of course, but this is the best-practice.
With the Prop bone selected, you can access its parent switching in this menu in the Rig UI.
You can slide the slider to select a new parent
You can also click the hamburger menu on the end of the slider to access the bake option, which will change the object's parent from one bone to another and bake all the previous transforms into the new space.
