Refine your rig in Blender - Blender Tutorial

- [Instructor] I've gone ahead and added some more bones to our starship armature, but I don't like certain things about it. So let's go ahead and refine our rig. Go ahead and zoom in and click on your armature. At the top left, switch to Pose Mode. We'll talk about Pose Mode a little bit later on in the chapter, but for now, know it's how you can easily animate bones. Go ahead and select any bone you want. I'll select the Master, and you can move it around. Undo that with Ctrl Z and rotate it. But there are some weird things that I don't like with what's going on. For one, I don't love that the ship weapons won't go in and out. I really want them to feel like they're blasting, not rotating, so that's weird. Also, I don't love that the Master is all the way up front. I really think that the pivot should be somewhere back here. And while we're at it, this is just too weird, and I definitely don't love that. Finally, if I click on some of these things and go into rotation and then set my orientation to Local, you can see that some of my bones are oriented in a little bit of a weird tilted way, and I really don't want that. That kind of assumes that the wing kind of tilts that way, and I really want it to be more flat on. Even this engine is at a slightly weird angle. Let's go ahead and fix and address all those concerns. At the top left, go into Edit Mode. Let's start with our two weapons right up here. I'm going to left click on one, shift left click on the other. At the bottom right, click on my bone, hold down alt, and then left click Connected. If you don't have an alt key, you can just go ahead and do this one at a time, making sure that Connected is off. From here, you can go into Pose Mode, shift select both weapons, and now you can see that you can move them. I'll go ahead and undo that. Come back into Edit Mode and make sure that Connected is still off. Don't worry, it'll still follow my whole entire ship, especially the Master. It just has a little bit more freedom of movement. Speaking of Master, let's address this a little bit of a mess here. All rotation is going to come from this top point of the bone. So let's go ahead, and in this case, I want to go to View, Viewpoint, let's go to Right. Wire frame. And things are a little bit hard to see, so I'm going to click on my little armature guy, little green dude running. Display is Octahedral. I'm going to change that to Stick. Now with my master selected and my bone here, I'm just going to move it back. And honestly I don't really need this bone right here. So go ahead, and if I rotate a little bit, you can see it's a bit unnecessary. I'm just going to left click on it. Armature, Delete, Bone. Don't worry, the connection is still there. And if I zoom in here, you can see a little bit of a faint dotted line. It's a little bit easier to see in shaded mode. This dotted line means that all these bones are connected right to this master. You can verify that by clicking on any of one of these, coming down to the bone. And you can see that the parent is the Master. I could actually go ahead and click on Connected, and that'll snap them right to the master. So let's go ahead and do that. Now I'm going to left click on my master again, go into Top view, and I want to try to line these up as best as I can. Something that feels a bit straight. There we go. And then from this side on the right, you can go to Viewpoint, Viewpoint, Right, wire frame mode and just try to keep that as flat as I can. See that, so now we have one nice thing all the way back. All right, now let's come over to our little running person, Octahedral. And let's select all these bones here. As I mentioned earlier, my wings are at a really weird orientation, see that? So let's go ahead and go to Armature, Bone Roll, Recalculate. And there's a lot of options here. More often than not you'll do Local X, but in our case we're going to do Global Y. If I come up to solid mode, you can see what happened, made all of them flat. Let me undo that really quick and you can see just what happened there. They were at an angle. I'm going to redo that and now they're all flat. And that's exactly what I want. For these two up the front I'm going to select both of them. Armature, Bone Roll, Recalculate, Local X. And if you'd like, we can do that for the weapons as well. In the case of the weapons, you need to select the little bone that's right in here first, and then the main weapon. Armature, Bone Roll, Recalculate, Local X. So those will put them at a slight angle, but that's because our guns are at a slight angle, too, so at least it'll be right on. Okay, so now if I come up to Pose Mode, Display As Stick, I can grab my master and move it around, and it's in the correct pivot. We'll address that in a second. That's a good catch. I can go ahead and rotate my wings And I can move my weapons in and out. Perfect. All right, now, as we did this, we discovered a new problem. What's going on there? When you bind an object, you're actually binding it by using something called vertex groups. So go ahead and click on your star fighter object, come all the way up to this little green triangle and scroll up 'til you see your Vertex Groups, and you can open it up a little bit. And then from here, go into Object Mode, Weight Paint. Let's click on ShipFront or ShipFront, or all the way back up to Master. So it looks like we have some areas here. Ah, here it is, ShipMiddle. And since we deleted ShipMiddle, it has no weights at all. So what do we do about that? There's a couple of things we can do. In our case, the easiest is to come back into Object Mode. Go ahead and click this little dropdown caret, Delete All Groups. Click on the Modifier tab. Delete the Armature. Hold down shift and left click the armature again. My object now has a dark orange outline, and the armature itself has a bright orange. And go to Object, and let's come up to Parent. Scroll up, you'll see Armature Deform, Automatic Weights. I'll click back onto our Armature, Pose Mode, and if I move this around, we have no more issues. Perfect. Sometimes that's not always practical, though. So just as a quick overview, you can come up to Object Mode, Weight Paint, click on this little green thing for Vertex Groups, and go ahead, and just like in texture painting, paint weights by hand. It works really simply. Anything that is bright red and all the way down to like a cool greenish color means that those vertices have weights attached to this very specific bone name. Now these vertex groups must match the bone names or it won't work. So go ahead and fix any one of those weird things that come up. Like for example, here at the ship weapon, all of these here should be red. Turn off my symmetry, and you can go ahead and paint some nice weights in there. All right, now let's come back out, and you can see we have an awesome rigged starfighter. There's a lot to go over in this video, but refining your rig and taking the time to polish it is going to make your animation look so much better. So go ahead and see what other opportunities exist to refine your rig and make it awesome.