If you are a Graphics Designer looking to master the features for materials and textures to create realistic looking models in Blender, then this book is for you. It can be read by both beginners and experienced Blender users; however, prior understanding of object creation and manipulation in Blender would be an advantage.
This is a must-read for Blender users who want to learn the concepts and at the same time experiment with the different Blender Material and texture functions. Have doubts regarding this product?
Post your question. Safe and Secure Payments. Easy returns. You might be interested in. The Outliner is a great tool in Blender to see the hierarchy of objects in your file. But when you create a rig with lots of custom shapes, the Outliner list can easily become full of objects you won't use. To remove the clutter of it, it's recommended to create an object normally an "Empty" named "Shapes" to be parent of all Shape objects.
This way, you can easily browse on the Outliner without dozens of shape objects. It's also useful to make this Empty object child of the Armature object, so all shapes are hierarchically related to the rig. To prevent these objects from showing up in your render, a good practice is to select them all A , move M them to the last layer and hide H them from your scene. The next screenshot shows the Outliner of this recipe's scene.
Notice that the shapes are hidden the disabled "eye" icon and will not be rendered the disabled "camera" icon :. Chapter 1 : Get Rigging. The ability to create bones that deform a mesh is great, but that alone doesn't solve all our rigging problems.
Some may argue that it's possible to create perfect deformations in every movement of your character just with lots of extra bones and even more detailed weight painting, but that's too time consuming.
We want our rigs ready to be animated in a short amount of time. We care about our character looking good on screen, not the purity of the technique. That's why we can solve some trickier rigging problems with corrective Shape Keys. Shape Keys are saved states of our character's mesh, with the position of each vertex stored in the computer's memory. We're going to create some custom deformations in our character to correct specific issues caused by our rig. The example will take care of one of the most common source of deformation problems: the bending of arms.
Open up the file ShapeKeys. You'll see an arm with two bones already set to deform the mesh. Try rotating the forearm on its X local axis for o. You'll notice that the vertices located near the elbow don't deform like a real arm would: there are noticeable intersections and the biceps should be contracted. Even with the feature called Preserve Volume in the Armature modifier panel that uses the dual quaternion method to deform meshes in a more realistic way, some things such as muscles and specific skin deformations still need to be fixed manually.
We're going to create a Shape Key here to act as the extreme deformation of this mesh when the character bends its arm to the maximum angle of o. Look at the next screenshot to see the before left and after the driven corrective Shape Key, where the biceps muscle gets contracted and the skin gets compressed between the arm and forearm.
Keep the forearm bone rotated on its X axis for o. Select the mesh and enter Edit Mode Tab. You'll see that the arm goes back to its original position, as seen in the next screenshot:. We can tell Blender to keep the armature's deformation on the mesh while we edit its vertices, so that it's easier to create the corrective Shape Key.
Go to the Modifiers tab under the Properties window and locate the armature modifier. Next to the eye button, enable the one with the tooltip Use modifier while in edit mode. It will bring us another button next to it. Enable it too. Now we can edit the mesh after the deformation performed by the armature. The following screenshot shows the arm with our desired behavior and the Armature modifier panel with the highlighted options:.
Click twice on the plus sign to create two Shape Keys: one called Basis , which is the base state of our mesh, and other called Key 1 , which is the one we will work on. This is important when dealing with complete characters and lots of Shape Keys. We're going to use both the sculpting tool and the Edit Mode to build our corrective shape. In order to be able to work on a Shape Key in Sculpt Mode, we have to pin this shape.
You should disable it when you're done sculpting. The next screenshot shows the Shape Keys section and the pin button highlighted:. Sculpting in Blender is pretty straightforward: select the mesh, pick Sculpt Mode in the 3D view mode list on the window header, and start sculpting the mesh.
Under the Tool Shelf T you can select the appropriate mode of sculpting, such as Inflate, Grab, or Smooth, for instance. Use the Inflate tool for growing the biceps, such as in the following screenshot:.
Since not everything will look right just with sculpting, disable the Pin button for the Shape Key you've enabled at step 5, enter into Edit Mode, and tweak the vertices until you're happy with the result of the arm bending shape.
Go back to Object Mode when you're done. Now comes the magic part: now that you have two shapes for your arm, we need to set a driver, so the rotation of the forearm bone on its X local axis triggers the morphing between those keys. Right-click on it and select Add Driver.
This will turn the slider into a pink color, which is how Blender shows you that this channel is driven by another object, expression, or property. The next screenshot demonstrates that:.
Open a Graph Editor window to set up the forearm bone as the driver for this shape. Select Drivers from the Modes list in the header.
On the Properties N panel, leave the driver type as Scripted Expression and change the Expr value to var. Rotate the forearm bone on its X axis to see the transformation. The biceps and skin get changed when you rotate the forearm, but the transformation happens earlier than we would expect.
To fix that, look for the Generator box inside the Modifiers section on the Properties panel. Change the Y value to -1 so that the blending between the Shape Keys starts only when the arm bending is closer to its final position. The next screenshot shows the driver and its values set:. The file ShapeKeys-complete. Using a basic rig as starting point, you move the bones around and look for strange deformations, which would occur mostly in joints. When you find such deformations, its time to use them as a base to build new Shape Keys that correct the mesh in such situations.
By using drivers, you can use the same bone values that caused the bad deformations to trigger the corrective Shape Key.
In this recipe you've learned how to create simple drivers in Blender. You'll notice throughout this book that most rigging features rely on them at some point. Fortunately they are not difficult to create. The use of drivers in Blender 2. Now, almost every property in Blender can be animated, driven, and used as a driver for other properties. It's just a matter of right-clicking over the property that you want to control and selecting Add Driver , then setting it up on the Graph Editor window.
You can even make complex drivers using scripted expressions that can take into account more than one property and math expressions, for example. Chapter 4 : Adding expressions using Shape Keys. When creating rigs, we often face situations where we need to alter between two states or properties. Forward Kinematics is the default state of regular chains of bones.
When you move, rotate, or scale a bone in FK mode, all of its children bones inherit the same transformation. Therefore, we can say that the movement of a chain of bones in FK is driven by its base bone. It is often used for arm controllers when the character does not have its hands on a fixed position such as doing push-ups.
Inverse Kinematics, on the other hand no pun intended , works the opposite way: the movement of a chain of bones in IK is driven by its tip. It is often used for leg controllers, when the position of the foot bone drives the leg bones above it, and for arm controllers when the character does have its hands on a fixed position. Since we may need to alter between IK and FK for an arm, for example, we can create specific controls to achieve that. These controls are normally made with bones that don't deform the mesh with some custom shapes applied to them.
The file has an arm mesh with three chains properly named and grouped: one for the mesh deformation green , one to act as the IK chain blue , and another for the FK chain red , as we can see in the following screenshot:.
The three chains have the exact same position, scale, rotation, and orientation on the 3D scene. This is crucial to make our setup work as expected. There is also a fourth chain with only one bone to act as the switcher interface. The bones are presented in B-Bone wireframe visualization with X-Ray enabled, which allows us to view them through the arm mesh and with different widths, since they are all on the same position.
Each bone on the deformation chain has two Copy Rotation constraints applied to it: one pointing to its relative bone on the IK chain and other to the one on the FK chain.
Constraints are restrictions applied to objects or bones. There are currently more than 20 types of constraints built in Blender with a variety of purposes. The Copy Rotation constraint used here is pretty straightforward: the constrained bone on the deformation chain will copy the rotation of a target a bone on the IK or FK chain. The constraints on each bone act in opposite ways, so we need a way to alter their influence in order to make only one operational at a time. We're going to use the switcher bone to drive the influence of each constraint: when the IK chain has full influence over the deformation chain, the FK will have none, and vice versa.
Select each of the green deformer bones and take a look at the Bone Constraints tab in the Properties window. You'll see that each bone has two Copy Rotation constraints already set: one for the IK chain with an influence of 1, and other to the FK chain, with zero influence.
You'll see that the Graph Editor window above the 3D View gets updated and the Influence slider turns into a pink color:. Under the Graph Editor, click on the driver on the left-hand side panel. Its properties will be shown on the Properties Panel N. Navigate to the Drivers session, leave it as Scripted Expression , and change the Expr field to var.
Since we need this switcher bone to act as a horizontal slider, keep the X Location value and just enable Local Space. The next image shows our driver set:. Go back to the Bone Constraints tab under the Properties window. Now, instead of creating the driver from scratch, let's use one of the new useful features in Blender 2. Now, both constraints will have the same driver. On the Properties Panel N at the right, you'll see that all values were copied from the first driver.
Since we need an inverted mapping, just change the Expr field value to 1-var. That's all we need to do create the inverted driver. The next screenshot shows the driver setup values:. Regular drivers act on an ascendant curve with linear mapping, meaning that a value of zero on the driver object will make the driven channel have the same value. When creating switchers, we need an ascendant and one descendant mapping.
This way we can increase the amount of influence of one driver while decreasing the concurrent one. As a tip, leave your desired driver in the default state with a descendant mapping. Do the same to the FK constraints and you're done. No need to change anything in the drivers values. When you finish setting up the remaining drivers, move the FK and IK bones to different locations and switch the IK-FK slider: you'll see that the deformation bones and the arm alter between chains as you move the slider.
The next screenshot shows the switcher in an intermediate position, where the deformation bones and the arm act under the influences of both IK blue, medium width and FK red, fatter chains.
The logic behind a switcher is pretty simple, but the amount of chains and constraints may cause a little confusion.
The deformation chain bones have two constraints each: one Copy Rotation with target to the FK chain and another one to the IK chain. The drivers are set in a inverse way: if IK has an ascending mapping on the Graph Editor, the FK must have a descending one. The controller bone does the rest: adding to one property reduces the opposite at the same amount. The switcher that we've just created is basically an interface to control a feature in our rig, and the principle behind it can and should be used to control various other rigging features beyond IK-FK.
As a rigger, you should be ready to use all features that Blender offers you to make your rig easier to use and understand. With custom shapes and colors, we can create special interfaces as the slider used in this recipe.
As we saw here, a single controller bone can drive more than one property in your rig. In addition to these colors and shapes, user interface bones should also have constraints applied.
In our example, the slider acts under a Limit Location constraint , which allows its transformation only on the local X axis, and just between the values 0 and 1. More complex controls can act on some properties from its X location and other ones from its Z location, as drivers for facial controls. Along with bones, your custom interfaces may have simple meshes to indicate the purpose of that control, such as the one on this recipe indicating the range and the IK and FK positions.
It's a good idea to make such meshes un-selectable using the Outliner: just disable the pointer icon next to its name. This avoids unwanted selections, since the interface meshes act just as a visual guide. It's also interesting to make these interface meshes children of the Armature object to make them hierarchically related to it. Blender 2. Although they are not difficult to create, they are beyond the scope of this book. You can also add StretchTo constraints to the deformation chain bones in order to make them stretch and match the sizes of FK or IK chains without changing the models' volume.
The StretchTo constraints should be added on a similar way: two for each bone of the deformation chain. Each constraint should be mapped to the relevant bone of the IK or FK chain, and its influence slider must have a Driver pointing to the switcher bone.
These stretching constraints should be used in conjunction with the Copy Rotation ones. Chapter 5 : Hands down! The Limbs Controllers. The process of weight painting is somewhat paradoxical: while it's one of the simplest in theory, it can be extremely difficult to get good results. The complexity of getting good results will depend on how good your mesh topology is, and how you position and create your bones.
Blender has an option to guess the bone weights when you bind a rig to a mesh, and it often bring us decent results. With this basic weights set, it's a matter of using the weight paint tools to define the deformation range of a bone into a mesh. The logic behind weight painting is very simple: you pick a deformation bone and visually paint its influence on a mesh.
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