Binding the rig

- [Instructor] Well, we have a rig and we have a character but they're not connected to each other. We need to bind to the character to the rig. So as we move the rig, we move the character. To do that, let's first clean up a few things. It looks like I've got eyebrows over here. This should be eyebrows dot L and this should be eyebrows dot R let's do that. Also, I think taking a look at these eyebrows now let me switch back to object mode and just click on an eyebrow. I think we can see that polygon that we are drawing the eyebrows out of and I don't think we want to see that. So with that eyebrow selected, let's come back over the particles area and under both render and viewport display, let's turn off show emitter. Let's do that. There we go. See, we can turn that off so we don't see it. Let's do that. Turn that off and turn that off and we might as well do it for the hair as well. Just so we don't accidentally see that polygon as the eyebrows are moving around because ultimately we're going to be binding the eyebrows to the rig as well. All right. So how do we connect the character to the rig? Well, we can just select the character. You can see, I have it selected here. Now I'm not selecting the eyes or the brows or the hair or the teeth yet. We're going to do those individually. Some we're going to bind and some we're going to parent. So we'll deal with that in just a bit. For now, we're just going to deal with the main character here. So with the character selected let's shift and click the rig and then let's press control P and that brings up our parent menu. Now you can see here, we can parent an armature to form with automatic weights and that's what we want. We want to bind the character to the armature to the rig and have Blender try and figure out what part of the body should be influenced by what bone. Now, it isn't going to be perfect I'll tell you that we're going to have to do quite a bit of work to modify this and get it the way we want but at least it's a good step forward from us having to do it from ground zero vertex by vertex, bone by bone. So let's click with automatic weights right here and there we go. It doesn't seem like a whole lot happened but if we just select the rig now and come back over to pause mode and let's select one part of this let's just select this hand control right here and then I'll hit G and move that and look at that there goes his arm. Now we've got some issues here. (instructor laughing) I'm going to hit escape here. First of all, things are moving pretty slowly. So let's go back to the character select the character here and let's take our subdivisions down to one, leaving it at two is pushing at least my computer a little bit too hard. Things are going pretty slow. So I'll take that down to one and also I'm going to take this armature modifier and move it up on top of the subdivision. So I'll click here and drag and drop it right here. So the movement of the armature comes before it tries to subdivide the mesh. So once again, if I grab that hand object Oh let me switch over to pause mode here. We grab that hand object and hit G it moves a little bit smoother. Now there's a problem here. You can see how the shirt kind of pushes in as we move that arm in. Well, that's one of the things we're going to have to fix. Also, we can take a look at the feet down here. If we click this and hit G, look at this that's going to be a problem. So we're going to need to work on those as well and this is very typical. This is nothing unusual. This is things we have to do to get the rig set up the way we want it. Also, if we can take a look at the head bone I'll select that and hit R two times and then move the mouse. You can see that the eyes and the teeth are not coming along as we moved ahead, right? And the eyebrows and the hair. So all of those things we're going to have to work on individually. Now let's just pause for a minute and talk about how Blender bound the character to the rig. If we select the character, Oh I can't select it because we're in pause mode. So you can come over here and go to edit and turn off lock object modes and that can usually give you the ability to jump out of a particular mode and into another one. So if I select the character, you can see it can jump over to object mode. This is really good to have on when you're animating when all you want to do is select the rig but while we're setting the rig up it can be helpful to have this off. So with the character selected I'm going to go back to solid mode and I'm going to come over here to object mode and now that we've bound the character to the rig we have a mode that we can access right here called Weight Paint. So I'll click that and now the character turns blue and what that's telling us is that you're not seeing any influence any weight from a particular bone. So let's say I want to take a look at the arm bone here. I can hover over the forearm. Let's say, press shift and right click and I get a menu of the possible bones I could choose that are underneath the cursor there. So let's say, I want to choose this forearm right here and now we get these colors and what this is telling us, Blender is telling us that the bone we just selected, that forearm bone has this particular influence on this area of the mesh. So blue is no influence at all and as you move from blue into lighter blue and green and yellow and orange, that means the strength is getting stronger and stronger. It's bound to that mesh even stronger and the absolute strongest is red. So that's just a visual representation of how much a particular bone is influencing the mesh. So if I say, press shift, right click here I can maybe choose the hand bone. You can see, this is what the influence from the hand bone is. Now we don't see much influence up here and we're probably going to have to add influence up here. One way to do that is by what's called Weight Painting. So this particular cursor, you see this cursor has a circle around it and that's because it's now a brush. So I can hit the F key and increase the size of the brush here, just like we did in texture painting and we have different brushes here. Add, draw, subtract, mix. So let's just say I selected add and I wanted to increase the influence that that hand bone has. Now currently it says ear over here and that's not correct. That's not the bone we have selected. So let's come over here to this object data panel here and let's take a look at vertex groups and there is the bone we have selected. Now, each bone has a particular vertex group that it influences. So let's say we tapped into edit mode here and with this hand vertex group selected let's click select. Notice what we have now. We've got the vertices down here selected as well as some up here and take a look at it. If I tap back into Weight Paint mode, right? It coincides with the weights. So the vertex group is a collection of all the vertices that that particular bone is influencing. So once again, let's shift right click this and let's choose the upper arm, right? So there we go. There's the upper arm. Once again, the red is the strongest influence, right? And notice here, the upper arm has been selected. Let's tap into edit mode, press alt A to de-select and then with this still selected, let's hit select and look at that. Those are the vertices that have been bound to that upper arm bone with this particular influence. So way down here is very little influence. It's just barely a light blue but working our way up here that's stronger and stronger influence. So that's how Blender is binding the character to the rig through vertex groups, collections of vertices, given particular influence from that bone and a vertex can have influence from multiple bones at the same time. So if I tap into edit mode here and select one point if I hit the In key under item we can see what vertex groups are influencing that point. We've got both the upper arm on the left side and the shoulder influencing that one point. This point here, we've got both the forearm and the upper arm 001 influencing this point but that is how Blender is influencing or binding the character to the rig. Each vertex is assigned a bone or a collection of bones with particular influence coming from each one of those bones. All right. So in the next video, we will go through and finish up the binding process we'll bind the eyebrows to the rig and then we'll go through and parent the eyes and the hair and the teeth to the rig as well.