Placing the joints of the rig

- [Instructor] All right, we're finally to the point where we can begin rigging the character actually creating the bones that will control the character when we're animating. To do this we're going to use a Blender Add-on that comes with it. That's already built in to Blender. So to access that let's go over here to the edit menu and go to preferences, and let's click on add-ons and here in the add-ons I'm just going to type in rig. And here we go, here it is, Rigify right here. And all I'm going to do is add a check mark and you can see it here, that when it's enabled with that check mark there we can now find this in the armature add menu. So with this enabled let's go ahead and close the preferences panel. And what I'm going to do is also change back to the material shading view just so we're not in the rendered view. And I'm going to ensure that the cursor is in the center of the grid by pressing Shift+S+one and now let's press Shift+A and go to the armature menu. And here we go right here, this Human Meta Rig. That's the one we want, so let's click that and there we go. There's the rig. Now it's a little bit different size than our character, but that's fine we can scale the rig to match the character. First of all though, with this selected, I'm going to come over here to this panel right here, the object properties and under viewport display, I'm going to click on in front. And that will ensure that we can see the rig through the character. Now also, you may notice that we can see it here and it's called Meta rig, but we don't see it over here. And my guess is that it was dropped into the reference collection and sure enough here it is. And in fact, our lights and camera are in there too. So we should probably clean this up before we do anything else. Because once you begin rigging you really need to stay organized. Things can get messy and confusing very easily. So first of all, I'm going to... With this selected I will create a new collection and move it to that. And now all you have to do is just press M key and now we can say, create a new collection and move it to that new collection. So here's the new collection. We'll call it Character Rig and we'll click, okay. So its created a new scene collection and put that in there. That's good. Next let's take our lights, I'm just going to press Control and click on these other lights here and recall that we've turned them off in this viewport overlay so we can't see them I'm here, but with all of these selected once again, let's press the M key, click on new collection, call this Lights and click okay. All right, there they are there. And now we can just disable them here if we want or we can go back and turn off the extras here, either way is fine. The camera we can go ahead and pull that out. I'll just click and drag it out into here. So it's out of the references collection and there we go. So now we're a little more organized. That's good. All right, let's go back and select our character rig. And what I'll do this time is tab into edit mode and just be sure and just press the A key to select everything. And now I want to scale this down. I can press the S key to scale and it scales like this but we don't want that. I'll hit escape. I want to change the pivot point from median point to 3D cursor right here. Now, if we hit the S key it's going to scale it down at that 3D cursor and that it's a little better for us here, right around in here let's say. So what I'm going to do is just bring it down so it's pretty much lined up with the shoulders here. We're going to have to do quite a bit of rearranging here. Clearly, the head is much bigger than the actual rig here, but that's what we're doing. We're creating a very cartoony character and we can modify the rig to fit the character. So let's begin doing that. I'm going to come up here and turn on the X-axis mirror right here. Now, when we come in and select a few of these bones I'm going to press the B key and border select these down here as well. I'll come back over and click on the move tool and also I should probably change from 3D cursor back to the median point here, there we go. Now, if I take these bones and move them over to center them on the leg, and the other side comes along too because we have that mirror on up here. I'm going to take this and move it down into here. And I'll take these right here, I'll just hit the B key and border select these and maybe I'll Shift select this as well so we have all of those, and I'll pull these down into here and maybe pull these out like this. All right, so let's check the side view and see how we're doing. I'll hit the three key and it looks like the knee is in a bad place here. It looks like the knee needs to be up a little higher, the ankle is certainly in the wrong place we need to move that up here. So let's begin down at the foot. I'll just select this joint and hit G and move it up to where the ankle should be. I'll select this bone and move this over and then move this out to the toe. So we're going to bend the foot at this joint right here. Now this bone right here, that's the one that's going to be the pivot point when the foot rocks back. So let's take this and move it all the way back to the very tip of the heel right there. All right if we tumble around we can see the other side has come along too. That's good. Now we need to do better with the knee here. I think what I'm going to do is turn on wireframe for the character, just so we can see where to place the joints, because generally speaking the joints should probably be on an edge that's in the center of a joint. So let me tab back into object mode and select our character. And then right down here, once again in the object properties I'm going to turn on wireframe and there we go. So now, if we de-select that you can see we have that black wireframe there so we can see what we're doing just a little bit better. All right, now let's select the rig again, tab into edit mode, go back to the side view. And now we know just where to place this joint right here on that edge, where the knees should be, right? So that helps us a bit. Now in addition, I think I'll take this joint up to this area right up here. Let's hit G and move that up. This edge here, I think is a good landmark for that. Let's go back to the front view, and this is our hip joints. So I think this is pretty good here. This right here should be probably where the belt line should be and it's probably right in here underneath the shirt. So let's move it to that edge right there. Let's go back to the side view. Yeah, that looks pretty good. And then we've got these bones right here. And if you look at the name, these are the breast bones and I don't think we're going to be needing these. So I'm just going to hit the X key and delete those two bones. We don't need those. Now let's work on the arms. I'm going to hover over this bone and hit the L key and that'll select it all the way down to here. But also I think I better hit the B key and border select all of these too. So we get all of those. Now I'm going to take this entire thing and move it up so that the shoulder is just inside the line of the shirt. Maybe along this edge here, right? Maybe just right in there. Okay, now let's, de-select this bone. And then I'll shift click this bone here, all right? And now we hit G and move this into the edge where the elbow is, now let's de-select this, and I'll select this hand bone, right? Along with all the fingers and then let's move this up to the edge where the wrist is but actually I'm going to need to turn this. I'll hit R and turn it like this just a bit and then move that up like that, all right? We're getting there. Let's now take a look at it from the top view I'll hit the seven key and let's go to solid viewport shading and I'll press Alt+Z to see through everything here. Now let's grab this. Oh, let's hide that hair too. It's kind of in the way, isn't it? Let's click here to hide the hair. All right, let's move this back toward the elbow. Let's de-select that with A, hit the B key for border select and let's move this into the center of the wrist here. I'll kind of turn it a bit, there we go. We could even take these and just hit the S key and scale these up like this and then move it to the wrist like that. There we go. Just so those are a little bit bigger. We'll work on those in just a minute. Let's come back and bring this shoulder into the center here of that sleeve, right about there. Now let's take a look at these here. I think we could probably move these out just a bit and then take this and move it over like this just a bit and even back toward that arm just a bit. So that's our clavicle here. Now let's go back to the side view and take a look at our spine here. Right up here is the neck of the character. So if I hit the B key and border select all of this, this is the neck here. So I can hit G and move it to, Oh, I have this selected let me hit Alt+A and then border select that again. Like this, there we go. And I'm going to move this to right here and then I'm going to take this whole thing and scale it up. But before I do that, let's work on these here. I'm going to grab this. Now, if I move this back like this, you can see, look it comes off of that and we don't want that. So sometimes you need to be sure that these are connected. There are some joints that are actually two joints in one and we need to keep those together and keep those centered on each other. So I'm just going to Shift select this and let's move this back. I'll go back to the side view and let's hit G and move that back, back like that. And here, we're just going to line these up along here, there we go. And I'm usually moving things in an orthographic view either the front or the side view or the top view so that we know that we're moving things in line with at least one axis. All right, so we've got the basic bones of the body in place. In the next video let's work on the hand and the fingers and then we'll work on all the face bones. So that's coming up next.