BLENDER

How to use Rigify to enhance your character expressions

Diana David

Diana is a 2D/3D generalist, specialized in animation, character design and storyboards. Her work can be seen all over the world on TV series, ads, animation shorts and games.

  dianadavid.net

Do you ever feel that the characters you create should also be animated? Wouldn’t it be fun to see them moving around with a little knowledge of rigging? I know rigging can seem daunting, but with Blender you can rig and even add extra controllers without requiring a huge amount of technical knowledge.

In this tutorial you’ll learn from scratch how to rig a biped character without much effort by using the Rigify addon. You’ll also be able to learn how to add extra controllers after you’ve finished rigging a character. Sometimes moving bones around aren’t enough to push your character, and you might have wished for an extra controller to push that lip a little higher. You’ll learn how to create a blendshape facial rig to add on top of your main rig so that you can exaggerate your poses even further.

By the end of these steps you should be able to customise several rigs to suit your needs.

01 INITIAL SETUP

 To better rig your character you’ll need to put it in an A or T pose. In this example the character will be in an A pose. You should place all of your meshes/objects in a collection on your Outliner window. In this example, the collection is called ‘GEO’. All the objects are well named to facilitate the rigging later on. You also should select all your objects and go to Object>Apply>All Transforms (on the top of your viewport).

02 ACTIVATE RIGIFY

 Rigify is an automated rigger addon that doesn’t require a lot of rigging knowledge to build a good rig to animate. This is perfect if you are an animator and want a fast, out-of-the-box solution.

Activate the Rigify addon and go to the front view in your viewport (press 1 on your numpad or go to View>Viewpoint). Click on Shift+A to bring up the Add menu and go to Armature>Human (Meta-Rig). A skeleton is created and should appear in your viewport.

03 POSITION THE BONES

Select the metarig, go to Edit Mode and place/position the bones. Try to position the bones by moving instead of scaling them. Position the facial bones carefully as these will help a lot when it comes to creating expressions. We will also be creating an extra controller for blendshapes later on. This way you’ll be able to choose if you want to animate with Rigify bones or with blendshapes.