I really like this video format for learning blender. You just picked a common use case for blender that people want information on and went over lots of useful techniques and advice for doing that thing. You just saved me a ton of time by making this hyper specific to the topic. Blender is so massive there is no point in trying to understand every little detail just focus on the stuff that you use to get your goal accomplished and you will learn everything eventually just by actually using the program as you go only learning more detailed info as needed
I normally use Tinkercad etc. to modify my 3D models, but watching this most excellent tutorial it just blew my mind away what can be done. This was so well put, all the hotkeys given (this is not normally done so thumbs up), the reasons etc. Brilliant tutorial, subscribed and going to watch more of your videos. Thank you. P.S. You should be changing your name to "the very good guy" :)
Thanks for the kind words :) Tinkercad is a pretty solid tool for making models and can even do some things more easily than Blender can e.g. creating things out different objects with exact measurements. However, Blender is on a different level to Tinkercad on most things. I hope the videos help you get to grips with it and thanks for the sub.
Incredibly useful video! I love that you covered several ways to accomplish the task and all of the common situations and issues we might run into while attempting it (like the face extension sometimes not working). Thanks for an awesome video!
This is likely to be an issue with the rig you are creating. Would it be possible to provide a link to your blend file. I would be interested to look at it.
That probably makes sense and I should have shown that as an option really but the "wizardry" is quite useful to know anyway I think :) and sounds more complicated than it is
This is great! I'm playing with both methods, and I am having a bit of trouble with the face sets method. I have three arm segments like you do, but they don't all move together. Is there some setting that I need to adjust? I'm using Blender 4.2.3.
I'm new to this but gotta ask: why not start with an extra bone? Make bone one from the left shoulder to the right, bone two the upper right arm, three the fore arm, four the wrist. Moving bone two, upper arm, should move free then with bone one locked in place as the pivot.
Yes you could do this and I should have mentioned something like that. It would work fine in this example but in many cases it won't so some form of weight painting would be needed. Also of course, learning the relationship between weights and vertex group sis a good thing :)
I got stretching under one arm so I repeated, but it got worse, as I think something was carried over from the last attempt, so I went for Rigify instead. But that too I had a problem with stretching an arm it 'pulled' the front of the hair scalp to one side also, weird. Also, Why does the pose 'revert' when I go back to Edit mode? and not stay in my pose, does it have to be baked? Thx
If you get weird stretching when you don't think you should this could be because of the topology of your model but is more likely to be a result of the "with automatic weights" not doing a great job. It is not really possible to explain weight painting in a comment but you could look at that or look more closely at the part in the video about using vertex groups to specify which parts of the model are affected when you move a bone. I might consider doing a video on weight painting for this kind of thing in the future. You might also consider doing away with bones completely and try the pose brush method that is also described in the video. It might work for you.
so the model Im trying to do this is a glb and when I add bones and then I say use outo weight it just makes the parrt I choose invisible how can I fix that
and when I tried to pose brush it it works but the arms are seperate from the body so it rotates it from elbow to shoulders wich makes it move out of the body how can I mix them together
@@savasingt4363 I have never used a glb file but it sounds like your model is not manifold. Maybe you even have separate objects in there. If this is the case, you need to join all the parts together. Perhaps it will be as simple as just selecting everything and doing CTRL J but it might be that you actually have to stitch parts together. If you still have problems, see if you can find a way to share your blend file and I'll have a look.
@@notverygoodguy ctrl j doesnt works because now when I use mask brush it still sees everything separate and mask separate so when I move it they just crumble apart
Great video but I'm getting an error when I try to Parent - Weighted. "Bone Heat Weighting: failed to find solution for one or more bones". I've tried to set the bones three times. I have them perfectly in the middle of the arm. I don't understand what this error means.
This is usually the result of errors in the mesh. First suggestion would be to select everything in edit mode and do a mesh -> clean up-> merge by distance. You could also check the mesh with the 3d print plugin to check if it is OK
Hi. Pls, maybe somebody can help me. I have the Blender version 3.5.1. At 3:54, I dont have this Menü to select. There is no Single-Bone or anything. Simply Armature. And i cant use the Shortcuts which is talking about "Press Shift & right Click" to set the 3d cursor or "Press G..." Thanks
The Armature in the add menu SHOULD give you a sub-menu which at minimum should include the single-bone option even in version 3.5.1. I suspect you may have some other issue here. You could try making sure "rigify" is enabled. Go to Edit->Preferences and then select Add-ons from the tabs on the left hand side of the window that pop up. Then in the little search bar, type rigify. It will show you the entry for rigify and here you should make sure you have the check box selected. This should give you more options under the armature menu option and if you still don't get any then there is something very wrong with your set up. The fact that SHIFT right click and even "G" don't work for you is a bit of a worry. It may be that you have changed the key mapping in the preferences somehow. If you are feeling brave you could re-set your preferences to default by going Edit->Preferences and then clicking on the three line icon that is bottom left of the popup window and re-load the factory settings. Let me know how you get on.
Why mess with all the vertex group stuff and save a bunch of time by adding one extra super tiny bone in front of the one at the shoulder then the 3 bones following will work as expected and you dont have to mess with the tiny bone attached to the rest of the model at all. Work smarter not harder.
I have mentioned this somewhere in the comments but unless you want to do a complete rig you can end up with with bits you don't want to move anyway. That aside, it is always good to learn the relation between bone weights and vertex groups.
With coding now days , it should be able to auto rig, I know I had it in Hash Animation Master 10+ years ago. And one should not have to hand rig at all.
Thanks for a brilliant video, it is just what I wanted, but I do have a problem, which is probably just me! I downloaded a different figure, followed it through and have one arm working perfectly, but I want to pose both arms independantly. At 15-06 in the video there is a line which implies this is possible, but I can't find out how to do it. I seem to get both arms working together or if I select my "Armature 2", it still moves the bones from "Armature" which I have turned off. Any suggestions please?
Most immediate suggestion would be to just get one arm working, apply the change by going object->convert->mesh and then just doing it again with the other arm. However, if you want to rig this properly then you will want to keep all the bones from the same armature and this tutorial wasn't really a rigging tutorial but basically if you extrude one long bone from the shoulder of one arm to the shoulder of the other and then extrude the other arm parts from that it should work. It won't be pretty but it should work.
@@notverygoodguy Thanks. I have managed to work out what I need to do to get what I want. I think it's more or less what you have said here. Basically 2 x shoulder bones, 3 arm bones each side, 2 back bones, 2 pelvis and 3 legs bones each side and then a couple up into the head. I couldn't have done it without your video though, so thanks a million.
I suspect you are selecting the bones first and then the model but you have to select the model first and then the bones rig to get the weights options when you do CTRL P. Makes sense really, you are making the bones the parent of the model.
She is cool :) I found her on cults3d.com She is a free download. I don't know what her original purpose was but I presume she was created simply for 3d printing. It's hard to tell from an stl file like this but there isn't much else you can do with them apart from some form of computer aided manufacture.
i just hate how my blender somehow does not use the same hotkeys as shown in all videos. ctrl+p opened a whole other menu, same for the join hotkey, it does nothing at all.
The only bone that ever actually affects anything for me is the hand. My other two bones never "catch" and they dont show up in the vertex mapping area. What am I doing wrong?
Are you sure you are extruding each bone from the other rather than creating new ones and that you are selecting parenting the bones to the model "with automatic weights" ?
Hello, I have a problem with armor trying to replicate the tutorial: the movement of armor just extends to a huge portion of the model! Can't guess how to fix that, do You have any suggestion?
This would likely be because the automatic weights over did it. Did you try the sculpt mode suggestion in the second part of the video as in many ways that is more reliable.
i am having trouble extruding the second bone. when you say to select the tip of the bone in 5:28 . that option isn't available for me, when i try, it selects the whole thing. what should i do?
You could try but it is quite optimistic to hope it will do a reasonable job but yes, if it does then it would be good to do first. Re-topology is the best option of course :)
The brush thing is dark magic. Witchcraft even.
And the fact that Blender is free still amazes me. What a great project by the community.
I really like this video format for learning blender. You just picked a common use case for blender that people want information on and went over lots of useful techniques and advice for doing that thing. You just saved me a ton of time by making this hyper specific to the topic. Blender is so massive there is no point in trying to understand every little detail just focus on the stuff that you use to get your goal accomplished and you will learn everything eventually just by actually using the program as you go only learning more detailed info as needed
Thanks for the great review :) I am very glad this was useful for you.
I normally use Tinkercad etc. to modify my 3D models, but watching this most excellent tutorial it just blew my mind away what can be done.
This was so well put, all the hotkeys given (this is not normally done so thumbs up), the reasons etc.
Brilliant tutorial, subscribed and going to watch more of your videos.
Thank you.
P.S. You should be changing your name to "the very good guy" :)
Thanks for the kind words :) Tinkercad is a pretty solid tool for making models and can even do some things more easily than Blender can e.g. creating things out different objects with exact measurements. However, Blender is on a different level to Tinkercad on most things. I hope the videos help you get to grips with it and thanks for the sub.
Incredibly useful video! I love that you covered several ways to accomplish the task and all of the common situations and issues we might run into while attempting it (like the face extension sometimes not working). Thanks for an awesome video!
And thank you for the awesome feedback. Appreciated!
Just what I was looking for! Thanks a ton.
Good to hear! Thanks.
Perfect tutorial! Straight to the point
Thank you!
My Blender 4.2 keeps crashing when I choose “With Automatic Weights”. Is anyone else experiencing this and if so, how do I fix it?
This is likely to be an issue with the rig you are creating. Would it be possible to provide a link to your blend file. I would be interested to look at it.
@@notverygoodguy I could send the file to your email?
Thank you! Actually an easy to follow tutorial!
So pleased it was useful for you. Thanks for the comment.
I was looking for that. I wonder if wouldn't be easier to add a shoulder / chest bone to keep the weight down than all that vertex wizzardry?
That probably makes sense and I should have shown that as an option really but the "wizardry" is quite useful to know anyway I think :) and sounds more complicated than it is
Thanks! Simple really especially the pose brush bit.
Yes, the more I think about it the more I think it might have been better to have the pose brush at the start.
This is great! I'm playing with both methods, and I am having a bit of trouble with the face sets method. I have three arm segments like you do, but they don't all move together. Is there some setting that I need to adjust? I'm using Blender 4.2.3.
Have you remembered to increase the "Pose IK segments" to 3 in the brush settings?
Awesome just what i wanted. Thank you 🙏🙏
Great to hear!
Thanks!
Is it possible to animate those pose brush movements?
Sadly not.
I'm new to this but gotta ask: why not start with an extra bone? Make bone one from the left shoulder to the right, bone two the upper right arm, three the fore arm, four the wrist. Moving bone two, upper arm, should move free then with bone one locked in place as the pivot.
Yes you could do this and I should have mentioned something like that. It would work fine in this example but in many cases it won't so some form of weight painting would be needed. Also of course, learning the relationship between weights and vertex group sis a good thing :)
Fantastic Video! Helped me a lot!!!!
Great to hear. Thanks
I got stretching under one arm so I repeated, but it got worse, as I think something was carried over from the last attempt, so I went for Rigify instead. But that too I had a problem with stretching an arm it 'pulled' the front of the hair scalp to one side also, weird.
Also, Why does the pose 'revert' when I go back to Edit mode? and not stay in my pose, does it have to be baked?
Thx
If you get weird stretching when you don't think you should this could be because of the topology of your model but is more likely to be a result of the "with automatic weights" not doing a great job. It is not really possible to explain weight painting in a comment but you could look at that or look more closely at the part in the video about using vertex groups to specify which parts of the model are affected when you move a bone. I might consider doing a video on weight painting for this kind of thing in the future.
You might also consider doing away with bones completely and try the pose brush method that is also described in the video. It might work for you.
But creating an extra bone to begin with in that particular case would have sorted that out...right?
Not entirely sure what you mean but if I understand you correctly then making as many bones as you can is ideal.
so the model Im trying to do this is a glb and when I add bones and then I say use outo weight it just makes the parrt I choose invisible
how can I fix that
and when I tried to pose brush it it works but the arms are seperate from the body so it rotates it from elbow to shoulders wich makes it move out of the body how can I mix them together
@@savasingt4363 I have never used a glb file but it sounds like your model is not manifold. Maybe you even have separate objects in there. If this is the case, you need to join all the parts together. Perhaps it will be as simple as just selecting everything and doing CTRL J but it might be that you actually have to stitch parts together.
If you still have problems, see if you can find a way to share your blend file and I'll have a look.
@@notverygoodguy ctrl j doesnt works because now when I use mask brush it still sees everything separate and mask separate so when I move it they just crumble apart
@@savasingt4363 Are you able to provide a link to your model?
@@notverygoodguy let me look around if I can find it
Amazing, thank you!
Glad it was helpful and thanks for the feedback!
Great video but I'm getting an error when I try to Parent - Weighted. "Bone Heat Weighting: failed to find solution for one or more bones". I've tried to set the bones three times. I have them perfectly in the middle of the arm. I don't understand what this error means.
This is usually the result of errors in the mesh. First suggestion would be to select everything in edit mode and do a mesh -> clean up-> merge by distance. You could also check the mesh with the 3d print plugin to check if it is OK
very helpful, thanks .)
Great to hear. Thank you
Hi. Pls, maybe somebody can help me. I have the Blender version 3.5.1. At 3:54, I dont have this Menü to select. There is no Single-Bone or anything. Simply Armature.
And i cant use the Shortcuts which is talking about "Press Shift & right Click" to set the 3d cursor or "Press G..."
Thanks
The Armature in the add menu SHOULD give you a sub-menu which at minimum should include the single-bone option even in version 3.5.1. I suspect you may have some other issue here. You could try making sure "rigify" is enabled. Go to Edit->Preferences and then select Add-ons from the tabs on the left hand side of the window that pop up. Then in the little search bar, type rigify. It will show you the entry for rigify and here you should make sure you have the check box selected. This should give you more options under the armature menu option and if you still don't get any then there is something very wrong with your set up.
The fact that SHIFT right click and even "G" don't work for you is a bit of a worry. It may be that you have changed the key mapping in the preferences somehow. If you are feeling brave you could re-set your preferences to default by going Edit->Preferences and then clicking on the three line icon that is bottom left of the popup window and re-load the factory settings.
Let me know how you get on.
Why mess with all the vertex group stuff and save a bunch of time by adding one extra super tiny bone in front of the one at the shoulder then the 3 bones following will work as expected and you dont have to mess with the tiny bone attached to the rest of the model at all. Work smarter not harder.
I have mentioned this somewhere in the comments but unless you want to do a complete rig you can end up with with bits you don't want to move anyway. That aside, it is always good to learn the relation between bone weights and vertex groups.
@@notverygoodguyyeah, might need that at a later date but this trick worked very nicely for my .obj model which may be or may not be a one off for me.
With coding now days , it should be able to auto rig, I know I had it in Hash Animation Master 10+ years ago. And one should not have to hand rig at all.
Thanks for a brilliant video, it is just what I wanted, but I do have a problem, which is probably just me! I downloaded a different figure, followed it through and have one arm working perfectly, but I want to pose both arms independantly. At 15-06 in the video there is a line which implies this is possible, but I can't find out how to do it. I seem to get both arms working together or if I select my "Armature 2", it still moves the bones from "Armature" which I have turned off. Any suggestions please?
Most immediate suggestion would be to just get one arm working, apply the change by going object->convert->mesh and then just doing it again with the other arm. However, if you want to rig this properly then you will want to keep all the bones from the same armature and this tutorial wasn't really a rigging tutorial but basically if you extrude one long bone from the shoulder of one arm to the shoulder of the other and then extrude the other arm parts from that it should work. It won't be pretty but it should work.
@@notverygoodguy Thanks. I have managed to work out what I need to do to get what I want. I think it's more or less what you have said here. Basically 2 x shoulder bones, 3 arm bones each side, 2 back bones, 2 pelvis and 3 legs bones each side and then a couple up into the head. I couldn't have done it without your video though, so thanks a million.
At 7:19 This menu has changes, there is no 'with automatic weights' ?
I suspect you are selecting the bones first and then the model but you have to select the model first and then the bones rig to get the weights options when you do CTRL P.
Makes sense really, you are making the bones the parent of the model.
Yes you're right. Thx@@notverygoodguy
Molly looks pretty cool tbf. Is she a game character or purely a model for people to work with in Blender? She should have her own series!
She is cool :) I found her on cults3d.com She is a free download. I don't know what her original purpose was but I presume she was created simply for 3d printing. It's hard to tell from an stl file like this but there isn't much else you can do with them apart from some form of computer aided manufacture.
i just hate how my blender somehow does not use the same hotkeys as shown in all videos.
ctrl+p opened a whole other menu, same for the join hotkey, it does nothing at all.
Hotkeys do occasionally change but ctrl-p hasn't changed in a while. What menu did you get?
0:01 wow
Not sure what exciting thing happens in the first second but I am glad you enjoyed it :)
The only bone that ever actually affects anything for me is the hand. My other two bones never "catch" and they dont show up in the vertex mapping area. What am I doing wrong?
Are you sure you are extruding each bone from the other rather than creating new ones and that you are selecting parenting the bones to the model "with automatic weights" ?
You know, I'm probably not doing that. I'll check it out later tonight. Thank you!@@notverygoodguy
Hello, I have a problem with armor trying to replicate the tutorial: the movement of armor just extends to a huge portion of the model! Can't guess how to fix that, do You have any suggestion?
This would likely be because the automatic weights over did it. Did you try the sculpt mode suggestion in the second part of the video as in many ways that is more reliable.
@@notverygoodguy No I didn't try yet! I'll try to go for the second method then, thanks a lot!!
@@lucacavalieri2735 Good luck.
i am having trouble extruding the second bone. when you say to select the tip of the bone in 5:28 . that option isn't available for me, when i try, it selects the whole thing. what should i do?
Are you in object mode? You have top be in edit mode to select the tips of bones.
@@notverygoodguy works now, thanks a ton
Cool! 💙
Thank you kindly :)
Can you tris to quads first -would make editing easier.
You could try but it is quite optimistic to hope it will do a reasonable job but yes, if it does then it would be good to do first. Re-topology is the best option of course :)
Well done 💙
Thank you. I hope it was useful.