The Blender Character Creator

Our Udemy course will teach you all you need to know to create rigged characters for video games.

You're welcome to download, fork or do whatever else legal with all the files!

How To Use These Files

You can download the latest state of this section, or go to Commits then download to get our project as it was at the end of any lecture.

Section 2 - Basic Rigging - Lecture List

Here are the lectures of the course for this section...

1 Introduction to Section 2

• Michael gives an overview, showing you what is coming up in the section ahead.
• Start with some foundational controls
• Setup our workspace to suit our task
• Create a simple rig

2 The Outliner Getting Your Naming Right

• You will understand the importance of naming throughout your project
• A core skill to get right early on

2a Deletion Options

• How to use the various deletion options
• Creation but destruction

3 Basic Selection

• Border Selection (B)
• Circle Selection (C)

4 Speeding Up Your Selecting

• Limit selection to visible
• Wireframe viewport shading
• Selecting more/less

5 What Is Topology

• Not all things are created equal
• Sometimes it doesn't matter
• Sometimes it is critical to modelling
• (Updated 22/10/2017)

6 Advanced Selection Methods

• Edge loops
• Face loops
• (Updated 19/10/2017)

7 Proportional Editing

• Really Useful when modelling
• Confusing if left on or influence too large
• (Updated 20/10/2017)

8 Materials And Shading

• Flat and smooth shading
• Different shading objects in object and edit mode
• What is a material
• Materials are render engine specific
• Often they will have to be re setup
• Simple material creation
• Material slots and reusing materials
• (Updated 22/10/2017)

9 Origins, 3d Cursor And Pivot Points

• The location of the origin point is important when translating, rotating or scaling an object
• Take control of how object transform
• Understand the properties of an object are the object origin's properties
• The origin affects physics calculations
• (Updated 27/11/2017)

10 Transforms and Applying Them

• Quick Tip
• Edit in Edit Mode
• General Rule, apply scale and rotate transforms

11 Introduction To Parenting

• What is parenting?
• How to set a parent
• Parent and child relationships
• Inheritance

12 Empties

• What is an empty?
• Why use an empty?
• Empties are a null object, however have many uses
• No volume or surface means they don't appear in rendering
• What they look like is just for visuals
• They can be used as an organisational parent
• Placeholders
• Used for rigging controls and other properties

12a Grouping Objects

• How to use groups
• Great for moving and organising you Blend files

13 What Is A Rig?

• A character model on its own can't be animated
• A series of controls external to the model need to be created
• THIS is Rigging!
• Any static 3d model needs to be bent, twisted, expanded moved translated etc.
• We already have the fundamentals of a rig
• Rigging is a whole new discipline for many and many mistakes and reties will have to be done to get to an end result you want.

14 Armatures - A Bone Based Rig

• Create an armature
• Identify parts of a bone
• Bona based is essential for game engines otherwise the animation won't come across.

15 Introduction To Constraints

• Parenting is a form of constraint
• You can lock transforms
• Doesn't stop parents transforms
• Learn about constraining movement

16 The Track To Constraint

• Flesh out the rig controlling the eye bones
• Use the track to constraint
• Updated (14/11/2017)

16a Trouble Shooting Rigs Part 1

• Check the roll of your bones
• Checking our bone constraints

17 Advanced Layout Controls

• Collapsing windows
• Create new area windows
• Swapping areas
• Getting back default layout
• Saving the Start-up File
• Screens - Blender's Workspaces

18 Transferring Data Between Blender Files

• Learn how to transfer settings from one blend file to another
• Difference between linking and appending
• https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/data_system/data_blocks.html

19 The Dope Sheet - When Keyframes Happen

• Overview of the dope sheet and what it is used for
• Different views of the Dope Sheet
• Expanding to view individual keyframes
• Using the dope sheet for more precise control over when things happen

20 The Graph Editor - How Keyframes Happen

• Overview of the graph editor
• Control points and handles
• Changing handle types (Fixed Errors 14/11/2017)

21 Creating Multiple Animations

• On one timeline and Tag
• Multiple actions
• Offsetting the animation to ensure no pausing when looping.
• (Updated 28/11/2017)

22 Making Actions Visible Outside Blender

• We will have to do a little re rigging
• Learn how to make a bone look like another options
• Make a rig that will work externally in multiple engines (Updated 14/11/2017)

23 Exporting From Blender For Unity

• Various options for exporting
• Sometimes experimentation is required
• Reading through the various options
• Ensure you only export what you need
• FBX is generally accepted by all game engines and other 3D Packages
• FBX contains the mesh objects
• FBX can export material name and assignment
• FBX can export armature bone data and mesh weighting

24 Exporting From Blender For Unreal

• Naming issues prevent Unreal from opening our file

25 End Of Section 2 Challenge

• End Of Section Challenge
• 3 Short Eye Animations
• Exported As FBX and test!

25a Solving Potential UE4 Issues

• UE4 can be funny at times
• Troubleshooting animations not appearing as you would expect

26 Section 2 Wrap Up

• Wow lots covered
• Looking forward to seeing your work!
• Try Applying your knowledge to other simple movements