Introducing Customized Bones and Animated Equipment
Tom Breuer
Howdy, I’m Tom Breuer. I’ve labored as a contract 3D designer since 2014, specializing in character and game-based purposes. To appreciate my creative visions, I principally use Blender and Unity. I started my journey into 3D artwork in 2010 once I needed to create a digital mannequin of an excavation web site for my displays. What began out as an extracurricular exercise shortly grew to become my manner of telling tales. The next 12 months, I started my research in communication design.
After commencement, I taught programs in Blender and character design as an adjunct professor and labored for an occasions firm as a lead artist guiding and coordinating an inner and exterior staff of 3D consultants. I additionally work freelance, producing 3D printable digital cosplay costumes based mostly on well-liked online game characters. However, my true fascination is with animated characters and the tales they signify. Staying true to my mantra, “Little worlds of our personal”, I began making 3D creatures and telling their tales with transient animations a couple of years in the past. You may view my characters of their pure habitats right here.
Character Idea
When creating a brand new character, I take into consideration:
What would this character need most in life and what would drive this character?
For instance, a turtle that wishes to get from level A to level B shortly. Or an ostrich that basically desires to fly even when it naturally can’t. My subsequent step is to brainstorm what this character must do or have to be able to obtain its objective.
Modeling Course of
I normally solely use Blender and Substance Painter for my workflow, however for this challenge I may also combine Reallusion Character Creator (CC) and iClone to know their advantages.
In Blender, I begin with the road software and start constructing the silhouette of the actual animal. This manner I can play with precise shapes and never lose sight of the reference drawing. I carry on rearranging the physique components till I like the general form.
There aren’t any fastened guidelines for my modeling course of. I simply pay shut consideration to the silhouette and go from there. I preserve the mass of the ostrich physique resembling a triangle pointing upwards and the one aspect that disrupts this circulation is the backpack it’s carrying.
Texturing
Instantly after the character is modeled, I export it to Substance Painter. I begin by creating totally different areas on the mannequin by assigning totally different supplies: metallic, plastic, material, and so forth. Then I swap to the Diffuse layer to give attention to the coloring.
For every colour, I add three layers with a important, spotlight, and shadow colour. I mix these three layers utilizing masks ranging from the ambient occlusion, edges, and regular route of the floor. Right here I work principally with gentle gradients.
Rigging
After I’m proud of the mannequin and textures, I proceed with the animation course of. I begin by utilizing the AccuRig module contained in the Character Creator.
As soon as rigged, I examine the automated skin-weights utilizing instance animations supplied by Character Creator. And I take advantage of the pores and skin weight instruments to blur and refine wherever wanted.
Including Customized Bones
Within the subsequent step, I import the rigged ostrich into Blender. Right here, I regulate the bones and add new customized bones. I do that, so I can animate the facial animation with these added bones. I additionally add new extra bones within the neck to permit for smoother motion. Lastly, I rework the skin-weights of my character and regulate it to the brand new customized bones.
Pores and skin Weight Switch
With the skin-weights accomplished, I nonetheless have to course of the spacesuit accordingly. For this, I take advantage of the Knowledge Switch modifier which permits me to switch pores and skin weight knowledge from the neck mannequin to the area go well with.
Including Extra Bones
After importing the ostrich with its customized bones through the Blender plugin into Character Creator, I begin to edit the facial expressions. To do that, I first need to mark the character as “Humanoid” by clicking on Modify > Characterization. There, I add the additional bones that have been appended in Blender. As soon as I’ve added all of the bones I would like, I can activate the HumanIK system to have them accessible to Character Creator and iClone.
Making Facial Expressions
I export the determine from Character Creator to Blender as FBX once more, however I choose the Blender with Face Expression choice to have it generate morphs for facial animation.
The morphs are conveniently named and keyframed, so it’s straightforward to see which facial features is being activated in Blender. With this, I can regulate the facial expressions of the ostrich body by body whereas conserving keyframes. Since I positioned a number of bones on the face prematurely, I can now use them shortly to regulate facial expressions and create all of the expressions I have to make my character speak and emote.
Within the final step, I export the animated mannequin once more as FBX and swap again to Character Creator. Contained in the Facial Expression window, I import the created FBX body sequence (If this isn’t carried out, solely the morphs can be used and bone animation can be ignored). After this, the facial expressions could be examined with sliders and totally different animations supplied within the Content material Supervisor.
Animating Dynamic Equipment
At this level, I’ll add the Spring bones and Material parts in Character Creator. For this, I choose my mannequin and click on the Modifier > Spring Bones button. With the window open, I mark the bones I need as Spring bones and set the burden, energy, and bounce attributes accordingly (the wings and the flag on the backpack for instance).
For the neck, I take advantage of fabric simulation to reinforce the animations with the usage of a texture based mostly on the UV of the material object (in black and white) that marks areas for simulation. This texture is added through the Edit Weight Map window.
With this setup, I can think about the primary animation and let iClone deal with the dynamic simulations.
Animation
Now I swap to iClone to work on the primary clip the place I normally begin with the primary idle animation. However, what sort of steady animation does the character really want? For me, it’s not a lot about one particular animation that reveals every little thing about our character, moderately it’s about getting a really feel for the character’s character and manner of transferring.
Ranging from the primary body, I pose the character with Edit Movement Layer, and replica this body to the tip of the clip. In the midst of the clip I add a contrapose that ought to maximize the counter movement. In between the keyframes, I’ll add increasingly more “interference keys” that distort the direct path between the beginning and center key.
For the next animations, I copy the completed idle animation and add an Animation layer in order that the idle animation nonetheless performs whereas I transfer the character to new positions. This protects me lots of time as a result of I solely need to animate the additional actions. Right here, you possibly can see the totally different animations all based mostly on the idle animation:
Animated Equipment
Initially I had wished to animate the entrance defend utilizing spring bones, however because of the robust actions, I made a decision to make use of bone animation as a substitute. However earlier than transferring the entrance defend, I needed to animate the determine to see how it will adapt to the actions of the physique. Then I regarded for the intense actions inside the animation sequence and rotated the entrance defend accordingly. For this, I take advantage of the Edit Movement Layer window as I did earlier than for the physique animation, however this time in FK mode, as a result of I need to entry non-humanoid bones.
Determine 8: Animated EquipmentAnimation Clips & AccuLips
I considered the internal monologue of the ostrich character and the way it will be alongside the traces of “Why did I turn out to be an astronaut?”. First, I take advantage of AccuLips to get the timing down for the animation. For individuals who aren’t acquainted, AccuLips is a robust animation software that may map spoken or written phrases onto an animated face. Particular person faces can show feelings by utilizing a plethora of accessible choices.
I take advantage of the sound recording from Vincent Fallow who lended a voice to the ostrich, giving him a beautiful character. AccuLips converts this audio monitor and provides a Viseme layer that exhibits the spoken phrases and lip animations contained in the timeline window. This enables the audio recording to playback throughout animation. For the bottom movement I take advantage of the “Emote” pack from iClone’s embedded library, which is then refined and customised with my very own animations. I put 4 clips in a row and play with the timing by slicing, stretching, and mixing the clips collectively till they match to the audio monitor.
As soon as I’m proud of the primary actions I begin to refine the animation by including a layer to every clip and including extra animation to emphasise the character’s character. Lastly, I add an Expression layer the place Face Puppet can be utilized to transcend simply utilizing AccuLips.
After I’m proud of the animations, I export the entire file to Blender, render the scene with Eevee, and export to Sketchfab.
Wrapping Up
Reallusion Character Creator and iClone present supportive options and make for fantastic additions to my workflow. Lastly, I’ve turn out to be particularly keen on the AccuLips system because it permits direct conversion of textual content and sound recordings into editable lip-sync animations.
Free Obtain :
• Blender-Character Animation Pipeline
▪ CC/iC Blender Instruments (addon put in in Blender) https://github.com/soupday/cc_blender_tools
▪ CC4 Blender Pipeline Instrument Plugin (addon put in in Character Creator 4) https://github.com/soupday/CC4-Blender-Instruments-Plugin
▪ CC AccuRIG (the auto-rig software is included in Character Creator 4) https://www.reallusion.com/character-creator/auto-rig.html
Study extra :
• Tom Breuer https://tombreuer.com/
• Reallusion https://www.reallusion.com/
