Character Rigging - Blender 2.80 Fundamentals

Blender is Free and Open Source Software

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This tutorial is part of the Blender Fundamentals series, produced by Dillon Gu.

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[redsquirrelstudio]

It's amazing how all this is in a FREE piece of Software that's basically helping people get into animation!

[steprockmedia]

Dear Blender, I love you.

That is all.

[SlightlyFizzled]

I just want to say that this is way better than 99% of tutorials because it skips all the BS and just shows you how it works. I knew nothing about rigging and now have a fully rigged model in less than 15 minutes. Thank you

[TonyInTownNZ]

How many rigging tutorials have I watched? ***!!! Many. Now you have saved me. Simple. To the point. No missed steps!!! You are my hero! Thank You!!!!

[ZacDevDude]

This tutorial is actually incredibly detailed and useful! Many companies making this kind of software don't seem to care much about consumer-friendliness, but Blender is different.

[Asmund]

For anyone still here in 2020 and having the issue where the bones wont deform. Add a armature modifier after the meta rig and point it to the meta-rig. Then do the automatic weighting.

[NerdsPlayhouse]

I’ve seen 100 tutorials on this.
Yours was the best by far. Great job.

[sleepychomps]

To everyone still having issues:
*MAKE SURE TO SELECT ARMATURE LAST!*
THEN, you parent it!
I was having this issue as well :)

[primaveranz]

In Blender 3.0, if the mesh won't move when you move the armature, select the mesh in Object Mode, select Object Properties on the right hand side (the little square icon with the four corner bits), in the "Relations" group check the Parent Type says "metarig" and in the Parent Type box choose "Armature". I was stuck for ages because following the instructions in the vid leaves the type as "Object" and it won't work.

[mles]

Look, Blender.... I'm legit suffering from symptoms of shock because of you. I was able to rig a character with ease as a complete greenhorn. Thank you so much, this just saved me the money that I otherwise would have paid to get someone else to do. You've just saved me an infinite amount of money. Thank you so much for the vid.

[DavidBoura]

I've seen this character rigged that way plenty of times, but never how it was done. You're making the perfect Blender manual here, so many thanks and bravos!

[michaeltyers]

I was expecting to have to watch several 30 minute tutorials to relearn how to use Rigify but I watched this at double speed and now I'm good. Thanks!

[halokara]

To be honest if I didn’t have Blender I would never have known anything about 3D modeling, same story for plenty of other people.. Thank you so much to everyone who helped make Blender.

[SidusBrist]

This is the most useful video of the whole internet.

[yourmomspenis]

MANNN
i was simply looking for a character rigging tutorial, found out how to enable an entire bone structure in an instant. man i love blender :)

[Impromptunite]

For people who cannot get the mesh to move with the bones after parenting, first, right-click your mesh and select "Parent" > "Clear Parent".

Then, in Edit Mode, select your mesh, then right click and select "Merge Vertices" > "By Distance" (this was formerly called remove doubles). This should delete some doubled vertices. Then parent the mesh to the rig just like in the video.

The issue seems to affect people using models other than the one used in the video.

[Xsjr]

In case anyone has the same issue as me, before you click the "Generate Rig" shown as the last step, go to Object Mode, Select your armature and press Ctrl + A, and select "Scale" on the Apply menu.

If you have scaled your armature to fit the model while in Object Mode in the 1st step, and you omit what i said above, when you generate your rig, it creates a rig that fits onto an armature of the original pre-scaled sized one and don't work as displayed here.

Honestly i appreciate the fact that this software is free and there's plenty of guidance given to us newbies, but god damn it the way all the "guiding" material is written and provided is terrible if you ask me. If you don't believe me try going through the Blender Manual as a noob and see what you can do. "Context menu", "Left Panel", "This Panel", "That Overlay" etc. all the while without providing any visual guidance in the form of images except in very rare cases.
The tutorial videos themselves are also abysmally simplistic without delving into potential first-timers errors and how to correct them, or in depth explanation on what to press, why and how to select things that are not clearly displayed. If you don't understand what i mean just go and take a look at the Owl tutorial, and read through the comments.

[SGtMarkIV]

Damn, this is so easy.
Blender is such an amazing tool.

[josephbrandenburg]

Rigify is also a great tool for learning rigging, because it creates a complex enough rig to give a beginner a lot of stuff to disect and experiment with. A lot of my own rigs utilize Rigify components (with a few improvements and modifications).

[kenpalarold]

This got me into making games
But somehow this step is the hardest for me