About two weeks ago we promised animations and finally here we go!
This is just the first iteration of a run cycle. Went Naruto style to try to emphasize those hands are heavy! 😅 There will definitely be updates to this in the future.
So what took so long? Lots of learning and failing that is what took so long.
To go from 3D model to animation requires a rig and vertex weights. Which turned out to be a lot more difficult than expected. The original thought was to use services to make things easier but they were often just too confusing or incompatible. Started with Mixamo and got kind of excited because it loaded and we got to see their animations working. There were some oddities in the final rig and weights though. After a bit of a struggle it was decided to look elsewhere.
Blender has a built in addon called rigify and there is another paid add-on called Auto Rig Pro that we also gave a shot. Both were very cool. Made generating a rig super simple. Especially ARP. After playing with both and deciding on ARP, suddenly thought it might be a good idea to see a simple idle animation in the game engine. And this is where it fell apart. Armory does not seem to be compatible with ARP rigs. Nor rigify rigs as we'd find out later.
So having done a custom armature previously and abandoned it because of all the other options. Then finding out none of the other options work so well with our engine. Ended up going back to the custom route after all. Luckily there were some absolutely great tutorials around. So we ended up with something like this.
It is not as pretty as some other rigs you'll see but it does the job. After adding some constraints and drivers in blender, got to wondering why the other rigs weren't compatible with armory and started to worry it was because they automatically added constraints and drivers! So had to then check out the engine with the new custom rig. Pleasantly surprised it worked just fine! 😀
In addition to all the rig woes painting vertex weights was really a not fun task. So after the add-ons for rigging didn't work out wasn't so sure another addon was the way to go. Perhaps it'd be best to just go straight to manually weighting. The built in Blender automatic weights that most start from just was not very good. The legs were constantly flying through the shorts and lots of other problems meant a ton of painting ahead. So ended up breaking down and going for Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning addon after all. Luckily this one does nothing that can be incompatible with Armory and it worked really great! The only things it failed on was the fingers and a few custom parts that were always going to need attention. So finally the character was rigged and weighted.
Time to animate. And animate we did. Lots more to go but a simple breathing idle animation and the start of the run animation are done. Can start building up the player controls in the game engine to go along with the animations. Soon actual gameplay could be taking place!
Also took a detour in there somewhere and played around with the textures some. The previous model was just a single simple diffuse map. Now the textures have albedo, occlusion, and emission maps. So color changes can take place easier. And as can probably be seen in the pictures there is now a bloom effect to push that glow!
Pretty excited to finally be sharing again. Hope everyone likes it!
If you don't mind me asking how far into you learning animation in Blender? I know animation can be tricky but one thing that has massively helped out the smoothness of my animations and create a more natural movement is learning inverse kinematics in detail.
Even though yes weight painting can be a pain in the arse I highly recommend learning manual weight painting over addon tools like rigify. Maybe I'm just weird, but I find when I break everything down to the bare bones ( Aha bones ) I get a much better understanding of everything than if I rely on complicated addons that can easily go wrong and be very fussy if you don't set them up in an exact way the developer intended.
Hope you don't mind me chiming in, thought this post looked interesting as I'm learning animation in Blender myself, found the tutorial above really helpful even though it was barely a minute.
Hi, I am the part of @chibititan working on this. To answer your first question, I've been going pretty heavy on the learning but only for about 3-4 weeks now.
Since I gave up on the rigging add-ons I have fully embraced building custom armatures now. The more I learn the more I like it. I have seen that Ian Hubert video. I like his videos a lot but have really heavily been leaning on these tutorials for a lot of stuff now. Also very short and to the point.
In the second picture above, basiaclly all those colored bones you see are IK controls. It really does make things nicer. I still have a lot to learn about actually building out the animations and that run cycle could certainly use more work but I'll get there. :)
After trying multiple ways of weight painting, I did give that voxel heat add-on a shot and I really like it quite a bit. It isn't exactly perfect. You still have to paint some weights and do some clean up, but it really does save some time in the end. And it adds some functionality I found very useful that I don't think is available in base Blender. Like you can actually say, only allow x amount of bones to have a vertex. Like if you only want a single bone per vertex to start before painting, you can make it do that. Or another useful one is you can select vertices and tell it not to change the weights on those vertices. I used this when I rebuilt the hands armatures after I had already fixed all the weights in the body and such. I was able to preserver those and only remap the hands with the add-on, then do the touch ups in paint mode. It likely saved me hours.
I don't mind you chiming in at all! I appreciate it very much actually. Always great to hear from a fellow Blender learner.
Yep you're going through the same sort of steps as me, sometimes it can be tempting to just rely on addons or even paid plugins etc. as shortcuts but those only really work to begin with until you have a solid grasp on the fundamentals like with everything. It's nice I guess to know I'm not the only one as I'm largely self-taught through tutorials etc. on this, same goes for programming and everything.
You are definitely not alone. 😀 Self taught is the best! Really shows the desire to learn is there. Though yeah... really tempting to take shortcuts that often end up being a waste of time sadly.
LoL the Naruto run XD that's looking pretty all right :) Looks like you went in the opposite direction to me, I started out building my own rigs mostly to learn how to do it and then started using rigify which made my life a metric boatload easier (I hate rigging! XD).
Love the glow!
bit of a sucker for glow XD
:D. May try out a regular run cycle too, but the Naruto run just feels appropriate with those giant hands.
It really does XD
I reckon with those giant hands with a normal run cycle no matter how fast they're running they're going to look like a novice jogger XD
Glad you like the glow! I am always a sucker for that kind of stuff too so... it will be all over this game haha.
From what I understand, quite a lot of people build their own and then go with rigify once they get the hang of it since they then know what they're doing. If I could figure out how to get the rigify rig to work in the game engine we're using, I'd probably give it more of a shot too. It really does seem pretty nice. But I also kind of like building my own now that I've done it once. 😀
It does help to know what you're doing for when you need to modify the rigs (which will always need to happen unless the only characters you have are the ones that there are existing rigs for XD).
Are you building rigs all the way from the ground up or are you using rigify's parts?
After the add-ons didn't go so well, I built this one from the ground up. Completely. No rigify or other addons for armature or rig. That's why it is ugly I guess. 😂
When it came time to learn how to make the cool shapes and stuff I just decided I was okay with the 'stick' bones.
LoL I was exactly the same. The cool shapes were too much effort XD though I did switch to Rigify after I started bone drivers and decided they were also way too much hard work (there was more maths involved than my meagre brain could cope with x_x)
Haha. Probably going to end up doing the same. I've only done one driver so far. To twist the mid/lower spine half of the spine controller to get the body twist to look more natural. It wasn't too bad.
We're thinking about switching 3D engines. Armory didn't work so well with rigify or auto rig pro. If we switch to an engine that does, I'll probably definitely revisit the add-ons. 😆
Currently looking at Armory still, but also Heaps and Godot. Do not really want to take the Unity or Unreal plunge unless we feel like we have to. But struggling to understand the linking for Armory. And Heaps will just not import the armature for some reason. Godot imported it and in an isolated scene seems fine but when I added him to the main scene his foot gets super stretched out for some reason haha...
Guess we'll see where we end up. It would definitely be nice to be able to use the add-ons but also just wish I could get the hang of one of these engines, even if it means custom building all the rigs.
There will be something obscure in some settings somewhere, probably something you would never have thought would be even remotely relevant XD
Good luck :D
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