Learn Rigging for Blender 2.8
Blender Fundamentals
If you’re completely new to Blender, I would always suggest taking a look at the Blender Fundamentals playlist on the official YouTube channel. It contains a few videos that will be invaluable to someone who is not only new to the software, but also to the terms related to rigging.
Here are a selection of the fundamental videos that are relevant towards the subject:
These videos can act as useful references to replace traditional documentation.
Grant Abbitt
Grant Abbitt is quite well known for having a wealth of accessible beginner content. Relevant to rigging, they have a playlist called ‘The Complete Beginners Guide to Animation in Blender 2.8‘. This is a much more practical introduction for beginners that not only introduces the basic concepts, but also gives some insights on the possibility of creating more complex control rigs for characters.
This is quite nice to see, because knowing how to create control systems for traditional armatures is a key part of professional rigging, and not many people talk about this when doing beginner tutorials.
To top this off, in part five of his series, he even discusses face rigs, which is again something that not many people talk about when doing beginner content. So I think overall, this is quite a high-quality course for being freely available on YouTube.
CG Geek
CG Geek has done a video for 2.8 called ‘Rig ANY Character for Animation in 10 Minutes‘. Like almost all other rigging tutorials, it’s based around getting a humanoid model rigged for animation, but I was impressed by the amount of detail they went into when discussing bone constraints for inverse kinematics.
They also briefly discuss the bendy bones feature in Blender, which is a way to replace long bones with smaller segments to get more organic bending of the mesh, which is great for things like spinal cords.To top this off, they also show you the appropriate way to symmetrize the armature data and which parameters in the constraints to adjust to make sure that both sides are working as intended. When it’s all set up, they quickly demonstrate how to pose the newly rigged character. And this is all fit into a video that’s under 14 minutes, which is impressive. Given the amount of information packed into the video, I would say that this is definitely an essential video to watch if you’re new to rigging with Blender. But one thing this video doesn’t do is provide a demonstration of how to rig fingers, but this can be a very tedious process and any educator could run the risk of frustrating the viewer if it’s not explained properly.
Alimayo Arango
This is where we come onto Alimayo Arango, who goes into a lot of detail with character rigging, including the creation of finger bones, in his video ‘Blender 2.8 Character Rigging Step by Step‘.
There is quite a lot of information in this video, and he even provides some good demonstrations of how to do weight painting for bones, however the video is two hours long, so it’s not necessarily the best choice for people with low attention spans. But if you’ve got time to sit down and study the process, this video has a lot of value to give.
Steven Scott
Now we come to Steven Scott, who instead of making all-in-one beginner videos, has made short videos that are focused on specific elements of the process, such as:
I think this kind of format makes his channel good as a source of reference content to accompany the fundamental series or official documentation while making things.
Paid Content
But now that we’ve seen some of the free content available for 2.8, let’s take a look at the paid content that’s available. Of course since 2.8 hasn’t been out for long, there’s not a lot of paid content about rigging for the newest version of the software, but there is one course that came out recently that I would like to share with you.
Pierrick – The Art of Effective Rigging in Blender
It’s a course made by Pierrick called ‘the art of effective rigging in Blender’. He also happens to have a YouTube channel. I think it’s not only the highest-quality paid course available but also the best rigging course made for Blender so far.The reason I think this, is because it covers everything that was mentioned in the free courses, but then takes it further by demonstrating in detail how to build professional and complex control mechanisms for rigs, in regards to both traditional armatures for characters as well as face rigs. Along the way, Pierrick goes above and beyond in taking the time to explain important concepts with unique demonstrations. Strictly speaking, there’s a level of effort here that I haven’t seen in a previous rigging tutorial for 2.8, let alone Blender in general.There is a total of just under 11 hours of footage, and most of the videos are kept around or under the 10 minute mark to keep them bite-sized and easy to watch.One thing to note is that Pierrick does have a strong accent while narrating the videos, but for anyone that has trouble understanding them, they have been kind enough to include subtitle files in the package to make the content as accessible as possible.
Chapter 1 covers the foundations of rigging and talks about the basic tools and processes used.
Chapter 2 is a must-watch because it guides you through building the first complex rig for a character. Everything here is shown in a step-by-step manner, and all parameters of the rig and associated constraints are well explained so you know exactly what everything does.
Chapter 3 shows how to build an even more complex setup based on the character rig in the previous chapter. This includes building secondary controllers and mechanisms that allow for advanced manipulation of the rig. This is something that I haven’t seen explained in good detail in freely available content so far.
Chapter 4 shifts the focus to face rigs, whether constructed from bones or built from shape keys. As you can see from the footage, these are very well made setups for giving control.
In Chapter 5, everything learnt so far is used to compose the fully integrated rig for the Crimson Ronin character, making it ready for animation. This character was made in a previous course from Pierrick called 3D PBR character creation for games. This chapter will also include some timelapse content so you don’t have to listen to the things you’ve already learnt in previous chapters.
Finally, in Chapter 6, he goes over some information that wasn’t discussed during the course including specific tips for things like how to rig tongues and tails, how to adapt your rig for other characters, how bendy bones work as well as lattices and vertex parenting.
So all-in-all this is a very comprehensive course built specifically for Blender 2.8, which is currently available for $49.You can get a hold of it on Gumroad, and if you use my affiliate link then you will also be helping to support this channel.
Auto-Rig Pro
But moving on from educational material, there is a paid tool currently available for Blender 2.79 and 2.8 to help speed up the rigging process that a lot of you might already know about. It’s called Auto-Rig Pro, and it’s available on the Blender Market for $40, with a light version for just under $20. It has a range of features including a smart rigging system that’s comparable to Mixamo’s auto-rigging tool. It lets you drag and drop points over the mesh, and the system will automatically try to create a rig for the character for you.It also contains useful tools for remapping, game engine exporting and facial rigging. Tools like this should not replace a solid understanding of how to create rigs manually, but it can definitely be helpful in speeding up your workflow.
My Recommended Path
So to recap what we’ve talked about in this post, I’m going to show you my recommended path for learning about rigging with Blender 2.8 using material that’s currently available. First of all, if you’re brand new to Blender, I recommend watching my video about the best way to learn 2.8. This will give you a direction that will quickly bring you to a proficient level with the software.
But for learning rigging my path would be the following:Start with the fundamentals on the official YouTube channel, keep the documentation and reference-style videos to the side for when you need them. (Steven Scott)
Then watch beginner content that is intended to act as an all-in-one guide, and do what you can to follow along because you will retain more information if you are practicing alongside the content. Good candidates for this type of content would be the Grant Abbitt series or GC Geek video.
Following on from this, you have a choice to dive deeper into professional techniques and setups by studying more in-depth content, such as Alimayo’s videos, or, if you have money to spare – Pierrick’s new all-encompassing course for Blender 2.8 (affiliate link).
As I said in my previous video about learning Blender, it’s always beneficial to learn from as many educators as possible because you may resonate more with the personality of one than the others, and certain educators will bring new mind-sets to the table that others might not have considered.
This simplified plan is only regarding 2.8 specific content, but of course there’s a wealth of material for rigging using previous versions of Blender.
Legacy 2.7 (and prior) Content
This older content still has a lot of value to provide and I would definitely suggest exploring some of it. However if you are new to 3D artwork or Blender, I suggest waiting until you have a solid grasp of the 2.8 interface and where to find all of the functionality relevant to rigging before you explore outdated educational content. The reason for this is to prevent frustration. The interface has changed significantly from previous versions of the software. As well as this, new features have been added, some have been removed, and some have been renamed or altered in other ways.
Here are some examples of legacy content:
Remington Graphics ‘Rig and Animate ANYTHING In Blender’
Daniel Kreuter ‘Complete Character Rigging Guide’
Sebastian Lague ‘Basics of Character Rigging’
CG Cookie ‘Fundamentals of Rigging in Blender’
Darrin Lile ‘Blender Character Rigging’
Thilakanathan Studios ‘How to Quickly and Easily Rig Characters’
Jayanam ‘Blender Character Rig Tutorial’
Cherylynn Lima ‘Intro to Rigging in Blender’
BornCG ‘Character Creation & Rigging’
Oliver Villar ‘Intro to Rigging in Blender’
dillongootoo ‘How to rig ANYTHING in Blender’
DanPro ‘Advanced Deformation Series’
Final Notes
Overall, whether you’re interested in rigging for video games, animated shorts or anything else, these resources should help you on your way.If you follow along with any of these videos, make sure to show the creators what you make because I’m sure they’d love to see it.
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