Attic:Old/Manual/PartIX/The Armature Object2

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Old - Blender 2.40

[edit] The Armature Object

The Armature Object in itself is a tool for the animator to move objects or group of vertices in a reliable way. An armature is made of bones, which are possible to parent to each other, or connect to each other. It was built with the idea of a skeleton in mind.

You can add it using the SPACE in 3Dview >> ADD >> Armature. You'll then enter into EditMode where you can add or move bones to build your default rig. An armature has 3 states. You can switch using the dropdown menu in the header of the 3Dview or use TAB to switch between EditMode <-> ObjectMode. When in ObjectMode, you can switch the PoseMode on and off with Ctrl TAB. Take note that PoseMode is now a state of the armature you can switch on/off. So when in PoseMode, you are still in ObjectMode (you can select another object, contrary to the EditMode).

• Object Mode: Your armature is like any other Object, you can move it around the scene, scale it, rotate it and edit options in the Object button window (F7).
• Edit Mode: Your armature is in what we call rest position, you can move, add and delete the bones it contain.
• Pose Mode: Your armature is ready to be animated, each bone can be moved, scaled or rotated, constraints get applied, you can pose your character, add keys and animate the bone's behavior over time.

[edit] Object Mode

Add Armature

Armature Object is like any other object type:

• It has a center, a position, a rotation and a scale factor.
• It can be edited.
• It can be linked to other scene, and the same armature data can be reused on multiples objects.
• All animation you do in object mode is only working on the object, not the armature's contents like bones.

Try it now: Add an armature to your scene:

SPACE >> Add >> Armature (Add Armature)

Mode Pulldown

When you add a new armature, you'll enter EditMode automatically. To switch between modes, use the TAB or the dropdown menu in the header of the 3Dview window (Mode Pulldown).

[edit] The Edit Panel in Object Mode

This is what the edit panel looks like after adding a new armature and switching to object mode(TAB) (Armature Panel)

Armature Panel

[edit] Link and Materials panel

• The AR: field lets you rename the armature Datablock. The dropdown is a quick way to select which Armature datablock you want to connect to this armature object. You can keep more than one version for the same character. Useful when you have a special move to achieve in a shot, you can turn on an armature for special purposes.
• The F button is an option to assign a fake user to the Armature. Again, if you have more than one armature for you character, it's a good idea to turn the Fake on, as if your armature datablock is not used (linked) it's not going to be saved in your .blend files. You can always do batch fake-assignement of armatures by opening the Datablock browser (Shift F4), go back one level (..) to see the root of your project, then go in Armature datablock, select all the armatures you want to keep and press the F.
• The OB: field is just to rename your armature object to something more cool and useful than Armature, Armature.001, etc...

[edit] Armature panel

Editing Options

• X-Axis Mirror Edit: Not really useful now, it's more an EditMode option. This feature tells Blender you want to replicate all of your bones on one part of the Armature to the other. It's a clean way to just do half the job. The axis of mirroring is X so left<-->right in frontview (NumPad 1) and the center is the center of the armature object. We will see this feature in detail in the EditMode section.
• X-Ray: This option will let you see the armature through anything in the scene, solid of not. It's useful to see where your bones are in your character so you can select them.
• Automatic IK is a PoseMode option. It lets you pose a chain of bones as if the bone you were holding was an IK target. More info in Posemode section.

Display Options: These options give you the chance to visualise your bones in various ways. Also note there is some specific options and features regarding the display mode you're in.

• Octahedron: This is the default view. Nothing exciting except you have a good idea of the rolling of the bones. (Octahedron)
  
• Stick: This diplay mode is really useful when you have a lot of bones in your view. It lets you "unclutter" the screen a bit. It draws the bones as tiny sticks. (Stick)
  
• B-Bones: It's more a feature than a display mode. This is only useful to visualise the effect you get when you activate the B-bones (Bezier-Bones). Each join between 2 bones acts like a curve handle and lets you get extremely curvy poses. This will be exposed in the Posemode section. (B-Bones)
  
• Envelope: Again it's more a feature than a display mode. But in this case the visualisation will be useful to tweak your rig later. Envelope lets you tell easily wich part of you character a bone will move. It's visually possible to change the zone of influence exclusively in this display mode. The zone is only visible in EditMode of PoseMode though. (Envelope)

Octahedron

Stick

B-Bones

Envelope

• 

  Draw Axes
  Draw Axes: To draw the axes on each bone of the armature when you are in Editmode of PoseMode. Handy when you want to know where you are, and which axis to use in a constraint for example. Mental note: Y is up, Z is depth and X is side, contrary to object for which Z is up, Y is depth and X is side. (Draw Axes)
  
• 

  Draw names
  Draw names: This lets you see names of bones whatever the mode you are in. It's useful again to edit your armature, create parent dependencies or add constraints. (Draw names)
  
• 

  Ghost
  Ghost: This option lets you see a ghost of the armature N frames behind and over the current time. This only works when you have an action linked to the armature, as we will see in the PoseMode section.(Ghost)
• Step: This option lets you choose the frame interval between ghost instances.
  

Deform options

• Vertex Groups & Envelope: Those two toggles let you choose if you want the armature to deform your character using the Vertex Groups and/or the Envelopes. We will see that in the skinning section.
• Rest position: This will show the character as factory default (idem as EditMode), no actions will be applied to the armature so you can easily edit it in the middle of an animation.
• Delay Deform: This was useful before when the old system was very slow. What it does is when you do a manipulation to the rig, it waits until you finish to update the view. Can still be useful though.

[edit] Edit Mode

The Armature Object, when edited, give you the chance to add, move or connect bones together. There is nothing else in editmode but bones.

So you add a new armature and what you'll get is a bone at cursor position (armature center) in EditMode.

[edit] Now the basics about the bone

Bone parts

• You can add a new bone at cursor position by pressing in the 3DView ...

  SPACE >> Add >> Bone

• You can select the tip (upper part) or the root (lower part) or both by clicking on the body of the bone. The location of the tip and root is independent. When both tip & root are selected you can move the bone itself.
• You can extrude a new bone from the selection using E. This will create a bone connected to the original one, meaning the Root of the new bone will follow the Tip of the original one. You can also Ctrl LMB to extrude a new bone. It will extrude to where you clicked.
• You can use Shift D to duplicate a bone.
• Using the W menu, You can subdivide your bone (Before/After subdivision) or flip the name of the bone between Left-Right using Flit Left-Right Names (See #Naming convention below).
• You can delete the bone with X.
• You can select a chain of bones (connected together) using L, when you hover your mouse over a bone.

Before subdivision

After subdivision

[edit] The Edit Panel When In Editmode

Edit panel: Bones

[edit] Armature Bones Panel

• BO: this field lets you rename your bone.
• 

  Child of
  Child of Dropdown: lets you choose which bone will be the parent of this bone. If so there will be a small button "con" meanning connected. This will just set the relationship between your bones. If you just parent it to another bone, it will do everything the parent does, rotate, move and scale. A dotted line between the parent and child will appear. If you select Connected, the Root of the Children will go stick to the tip of the parent, giving you a chain of bones like the 2 bones in your arm. (Child of)
  
• 

  Segmented Bone
  Segm: This is the option to use B-Bones. Set to something > 1, it will cut your bone in many little segments and will deform them on a bezier curve. It really show off in a chain of bones though. See the example bettween 1 segment (right) and 3 segment each (left). (I returned in Object mode to see the effect). (Segmented Bone)
  
• 

  Envelope
  Dist: This is the area of influence of the bone. it can be visualised using the Envelope display mode. We generally don't touch this field as there is a more easy and fast way to change this option. Turn Envelope drawmode on and select a bone. Then using Alt S, you can scale the zone of influence. Better: you can do it on multiple bones and you can do it in EditMode and PoseMode. (Envelope)
  
• 

  Weight
  Weight: This gives you the liberty to tell if this bone will work more or less on the geometry. For example if you have 2 bones working with envelope and crossing each other, you can tell one of them to get more power by lowering the weight of the bone you don't want to use much. If both bones have the same weight (like 1:1) they will influence the geometry equally. But if you set one to 0.5. The other one at 1 will influence more. For example in this image, 2 bones using envelope influence try to move the same geometry. The 2 on the left have the same weight, you can see the geometry didn't move. On the right one of the bones has 0.5 so the bone with 1 of weight is winning the pulling contest!. (Weight)
  
• 

  Hinge
  Hinge: This tells the bone to remain motionless in a chain. It doesn't copy the rotation and scale of the parent. Useful for mechanical rig I would say, as you can animate the rotation of the hinge bone without having to correct it because the parent rotated. (Hinge)
  
• Deform: This lets you tell if you want the bone to deform at all. It's like setting weight to 0, except it's faster this way. Useful when using a bone as a target or a controller, i.e. a bone you just want to use to work on other bones.
• Mult: to deform geometry you can use vertex group and/or Envelope. The fact that you can mix both ways gets interesting when you can use one to better tweak the other one. Like using envelope everywhere but tweaking a difficult place manually with vertex group. It's gonna be shown more in details in the Skinning section.
• Hide: This option lets you hide the bone. You can use it to hide useless bones when you try to see what you're doing or just to get a functional rig for an animator when everything is done, kind of "hiding the useless". For example, when you animate you don't need the entire chain of the leg, just the controllers. This option is valid for both EditMode and PoseMode. It's possible to directly Hide bones in the 3Dview by selecting the bones to hide and do H. You can turn all bone visible with Alt H too.

[edit] Naming conventions

In case your rig can be mirrored in half (i.e. it's bilaterally symmetrical), it's worthwile to stick to a left-right naming convention. This will enable you to use some very cool tools that will probably save you some time and effort.

• Naming conventions in Blender are not only for you to find the right bone, but also to tell Blender when any two of them are a pair.
• You should give your bones meaningful names. Like leg, arm, finger, back, foot, etc...
• If you have a bone that has a copy on the other side, like an arm (you have 2 arms right?), then call them arm.Left and arm.Right
• Other conventions are _L, _LEFT, _left, .L, and .Left. Pick one and stick to it as close as possible when rigging, it will pay off.
• You can copy a bone named bla.L and flip it over using W >> flip name. Blender will name the copy bla.L.001 and flipping the name will give you bla.R. Extensions such as .001 are also preserved.

Here's an example of naming in a simple rig (Sample Rig)

Sample Rig

[edit] Mirror Editing

Now the X-Axis Mirror Edit feature.

It's possible to rig only half of your character and have Blender do the other half for you - this method is cool, simple and it saves time. We will create a stick figure as an example, no need to work on geometry yet.

• Add a new armature to an empty scene.
  • Turn on X Axis Mirror Edit so we can test it out.
  • To see the names of each bone, turn on Draw Names in the Armature panel in EditMode.
  • Switch to front view (NumPad 1) and be sure to use the center of the armature (purple dot) as the center of your rig.
• Name your first bone Back. Move and scale it to cover the entire back of the guy.
• Select the tip and extrude (E) a bone from it to cover the Head. Name it Head.
• Select the tip of Back again and do Shift E to tell Blender you're starting a mirrored chain of bones.
  • Blender will automatically extrude a bone like you and will mirror whatever you do.
  • Take note that the name of both bones are Back_L and Back_R
  • Blender also try to keep name convention. But the names aren't good anymore.
• To change the names:
  • Start by editing one of the name as Arm.
  • Add the suffix to it (_L or _R).
  • Then hover you mouse over the name field in editbutton and do Ctrl C. You just copied the name of the bone!
  • Select the other bone, hover you mouse over the name field and do Ctrl V. This will copy the name as-is. But as there is already a bone with the same name, Blender will add .001 after it.
  • No problem just go in 3Dview and do W >> Flip name. There you have a working mirror again.
  • The mirror edition work using names. If you move a bone named bla_L and there is a bone named bla_R in the same armature, Blender will mirror the move you do to it, so make sure you follow name convention correctly.
• Then we can continue:
  • Extrude an other bone to make the lower part of the arm using E or Ctrl LMB . The new set of bones should be arm_L.001 arm_R.001.
  • Then we will add the legs. Up to now we always worked from the tips of the bone. This is easy as blender understand you want to create children of the selected bone, but to make the legs you need to extrude from the root of Back. So go ahead select the root of Back and do Shift E to start a pair of chain. Rename them to leg+suffix.
  • Now take note that doing so will not parent or connect the new bones to anything. We don't want it to be connected to the tip of Back, it would look silly. But we want it to follow the body!
  • The way to go is to parent the two leg we just created to the Back bone. The old way (pre 2.40) was to select all bone one by one and select the parent manualy in the drop down. There is an active bone and a selected bone now in EditMode and PoseMode. The active bone is the last you selected. Selected bone are all other selected bone. In this case we can't work with more than 2 bones selected. Select the child (a leg) then select the parent (Back) and Do Ctrl P. A menu will popup asking connected or keep offset. The difference is as simple as connected or not. For now use keep offset so you just parent it. Repeat this for each leg.
  • It's also possible to remove parent easily. Select any bone you want to remove parent relation from and do Alt P. A menu will popup asking if you want to clear all or just to unconnect. Of source you don't need to select the parent and/or the child for this to work any parent relationship will be cleared. So if you do that on a bone which is parent of 5 bones. then all children will be parentless.
  • Extrude one more time to get a leg with 2 bones.
• Turn on the Stick display mode and enjoy your guy made of sticks. (Stick guy)

Stick guy

• Now you can go into PoseMode and pose your guy as you want.
• You can move the entire guy just by moving the Back bone. Because this is how we built him. This bone is the most high in the bone hierarchy, The parent of all bone we could say.

[edit] Pose Mode

PoseMode is a very versatil place where you Animate your character, create and manage constraints and apply your rig to your character.

Contrary to EditMode, Pose mode isn't a obligatory mode where you can't do anything else. It's now part of the UI like any other object. A good example of it is you can be in posemode and still select another object.

[edit] The Edit Panel When In Posemode

When you are done building your armature, you can go into PoseMode to add constraints and start creating actions.

There are also some new tools accessible in PoseMode that you may want to look at. The panel has changed a bit too (PoseMode panel)

PoseMode panel

• What's new in the panels?:
  • Automatic IK Use this feature in the Editbutton (F9) to pose a chain of bones like it was an IK chain. The usefulness is very limited though. It works well only if there is no other IK solver in the chain, and if your chain is isolated from the rest of the rig.
  • Ghost: In the Armature panel the Ghost option let you see the action linked to the armature over time. Also called onion skinning.(Ghost)
    
  • In:/Out: There is two number field to better tweak the effect of B-Bones. The In:/Out: is used to tell the scale of the virtual handle of the bezier curve. In: is the root of the bone and Out: is the tip. The bigger the value, the bigger the effect of rotation. (B-Bones In/Out)
    
  • Constraints There is now a Constraints panel where you can add a constraint to a bone, like any other object in the scene. This will be shown later.

Ghost

B-Bones In/Out

[edit] Pose Hotkeys

• You can pose your rig using G, S and R. Note that if the bone is part of a chain it can't be moved (except if it's the first of the chain, moving all the chain as they are all children), so you rotate the bone instead.
• You can do Alt S on one or more bones while in Envelope display mode to tweak the envelope size in real time while animating. Usefull when for example you move the hand and some part of the character isn't in the influence zone; the result will be that some vertices will stay behind.
• You can do Ctrl C to copy stuff from one bone to a group of bones. The options are location, rotation, scale and constraint. Constraint is very handy when you want to copy a constraint to other bone. The way it work is easy.
• The W menu get some neat options too:
  • Select constraint target: Will select the target of the bone's constraint currently selected.
  • Flip name: Yep you can flip name in PoseMode too.
  • Calculate path/Clear path: This is a visual way to see the action linked to your armature. You can select just some bones and ask Blender to show you the path of the bone.
• You can pose your character and select all bone you want to see included in the action and press I. You can insert a key just for loc, rot or size. Avail will add a key to all availables channels in IPO window (all channel you previously added something).
• When you insert a key for your armature, a new action is created and linked to the armature if there was no action before. You can also see the curves of each selected bone of the armature in the IPO window.
• You can parent a bone to an external object by selecting this object then selecting the bone in question so it's active (The armature is in PoseMode so you can select a bone). Do Ctrl P. Then when you move the bone the object will follow. This kind of Hard relationship doesn't allow multiple bone influence like a vertice. It's usefull when doing robot rigs as you are just moving objects around.

Old

Redirects to fix

• Manual/PartII/Edit Mode → Attic:Old/Manual/PartII/Edit Mode
• Manual/PartII/ObjectMode → Manual/Objects
• Manual/PartIX/The Datablock → Attic:Old/Manual/PartIX/The Datablock
• Talk:Manual/PartIX/The Armature Object2 → Attic talk:Old/Manual/PartIX/The Armature Object2