13- Finishing Head And Neck (The Art Of Effective Rigging In Blender/ Chapter-2/ Ep-7)

VFX Guy

🔹 Steps to Finish a Head & Neck Rig 1. Build the Bone Chain  Add Neck bones (1–3, depending on realism).  Add Head bone (parented to top neck bone).  Add a Jaw bone if you plan on facial animation.  2. Add Controls (Control Bones)  Create a Head Control bone (often a circle or custom shape) placed around the head.  Create a Neck Control bone if you want independent chest-to-neck motion.  Parent/Constraint the Head bone to the Head Control.  3. Set Constraints  Use Copy Rotation or Child Of constraints so:  The head bone follows the control bone.  Neck bends naturally when the control moves.  Optionally add Limit Rotation so the head can’t twist unnaturally.  4. Weight Painting  Make sure the head vertices are assigned to the Head bone’s vertex group.  Neck vertices → Neck bones.  Smooth the weights so deformation looks natural when bending.  5. Optional: Advanced Features  Look At Controller → Add a target object or bone so the head always looks at it.  IK/FK Switch → Some rigs use IK for head aiming, FK for manual posing.  Custom Properties + Drivers → For toggling options (like “Head Follow” ON/OFF).  6. Testing  Switch to Pose Mode → move the Head Control.  Check if the neck bends smoothly and the head follows naturally.  Fix weight painting if the mesh deforms badly.  🔹 End Result  Animator sees only the Control Bones (nice shapes like circles/arrows).  Deform Bones stay hidden in another bone layer.  The head can tilt, nod, rotate, and follow targets smoothly.  ✅ In short: Finishing a Head and Neck rig means adding control bones, constraints, weight painting, and optional features so that the animator can move the head/neck easily without touching deform bones directly.

Transcript

00:00So we will now create our first custom property to finish the rig of the neck and the head.

00:07In the previous video, we have created a bone that will hold those custom properties.

00:13So why are we using a bone instead of the armature or whatever other thing, since we

00:18know that we can add a custom property to anything.

00:22To demonstrate it, I have opened the demo file that is available in the course.

00:29And the thing is that whenever you add the custom property to a bone, and this is very

00:34important, you have to set it to the bone, the custom properties keyframe, whenever you

00:40will add a keyframe to set the property, will be held in the same action as the current animation.

00:50So in this case, I have this kind of cinematic animation, which is using one action.

00:57And in this action, I will be able to find all the keyframe of the custom property.

01:03If I create a run cycle, creating a new action, those keyframes for the custom properties will

01:11be in the action run cycle.

01:14So they are going to be editable.

01:17So we can find those custom properties in this bone.

01:20And when I go in the very last stack of the bone properties, I can find all the custom

01:28properties I have created.

01:31On the final rig, I've been using a bone with a custom shape P to make it more obvious.

01:38Since we haven't seen custom shapes yet, I wanted to show it to you with this regular display.

01:45Now if I expand my action editor, you can see that I have all my custom properties keyframed

01:52in this action.

01:54Big warning on the second thing is that you can add custom properties in edit mode, but

02:00you have to add them in pause mode.

02:03This will give you access to another property tab that we can't really see here.

02:10But if you add them in edit mode, you won't be able to access them while animating.

02:16So I'm in pause mode with my properties bone selected.

02:20I've been in the custom properties and I've added a neck follow property.

02:25Once it's set, I will right click on it and copy the data path to add access to this value.

02:32I will then select my constraint bone, and on the copy rotation constraint, I will add

02:39a new driver.

02:41So I will set it to average value.

02:44I will use a single property here.

02:49Then we have to select our rig, so just on the right, and just past the value.

02:56And our driver is set, so you can see that it's way easier than before.

03:02Now I can test it.

03:04When I select my bone with the properties, if I use the slider here, you can see my character

03:11reacting.

03:12Also, we can find those custom properties in the rig UI using the bone layer manager.

03:20So this is very, very handy whenever you are animating to have those properties in the

03:25basic 3D view.

03:28So we can now repeat the full process to create the head follow mechanism.

03:33Select the joint between the neck and the head.

03:36Extrude the first bone, which will be our MCH bone.

03:41We can then duplicate and scale down this bone, that will be our intermediary bone.

03:49Then parent the big bone, the first one, to the neck, and the second one to our control

03:56torso.

03:57Then in pause mode, we'll add constraint from the MCH bone to the MCH intermediary bone.

04:04I press in control, shift to C, and we'll add a location, a rotation, and a scale.

04:10For the sake of organization, I'm moving the order of the constraint.

04:16The constraint order is important, but in this case, those different constraints doesn't

04:22override or influence each other, so it doesn't matter.

04:26Then you can rapidly test the mechanism going into pause mode.

04:30Rotate the head or the torso and reduce the influence.

04:34Then we'll select our properties bone, add a new custom property onto the bone that we'll

04:41call head follow.

04:43As usual, we'll right-click on the value and copy the data path.

04:49And as we are lazy, we'll select our previously created driver, right-click, and copy the driver.

04:55Then we will pass the driver on the new influence.

05:00So if I now trigger the neck follow custom properties, it will influence the rotation.

05:06And now if I edit the driver, I can go to the path and pass the path as we have copied the

05:13head follow path.

05:15And now it works.

05:16It's using the head follow.

05:17Being able to copy and pass driver will be a time saver for sure.

05:23Since we have a custom property bone to drive those bones, we can move those into the MCH

05:29layer since we won't have to access them.

05:33This will result in a cleaner organization for the rig.

05:37So I'm just double checking that everything works properly.

05:41We can now rename the head and the neck, adding the control prefix.

05:48And then we will create a new layer for the control tweak of the torso so that we can separate

05:55the main controller and the secondary controllers.

05:59It's super important to organize your rig along the way because it can get pretty complex rapidly

06:05and you will get lost.

06:08So before we jump to the next video, I will just revise the neck deformation by editing

06:15the chest and neck vertex root.

06:17To make my life easier, I will enable the edit mode and the mesh display mode on the

06:24armature modifier so that I can see my character deformed.

06:28I will then select the whole neck using the control plus shortcut or you can use the L shortcut

06:36and press shift H.

06:39In the vertex group stack, I will select the depth chest and I will add some influence to

06:46the base of the neck.

06:47So I will assign a one value for the weight on those edge loops.

06:54And for the neck, I will remove the influence of the neck on the base.

06:59And here I will reduce on this edge loop to 0.5 the influence of the chest and 0.5 the influence

07:08of the neck so that I get a nice fall off.

07:24And I will then move back to you.

07:39And here I will move back to you.

07:43That was great.

07:44That was great.

07:45I will be teaching you to assist you.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended