[This is post is part of a series of tutorials.]
Topic 4: Posing - General Overview
For my tutorial sample, I'm going to use the Shepard from my comics, as she's my favorite model to work with. However, feel free to use whatever model you want. They all have *roughly* the same structure. (Well, as far as the humanoid creatures are concerned. Things like Varren or Hanar naturally have different structures.)
In case you're curious, for female Shepard, you can look into:
BIOG_HMF_ARM_CTH_R <-- Casual clothes.
BIOG_HMF_ARM_SHP_R <-- Shepard's armor.
BIOG_HMF_HED_PROMorph_R <-- Female human heads.
BIOG_HMF_HIR_PRO <-- Hair styles.
(Male Shepard would be the same, except HMM instead of HMF.)
To start off with, let me talk a bit about how I keep my screens.
There are four viewports. I use the two on the right side (the top right and top bottom).
The top one I make a Perspective view by clicking into that viewport and pushing P.
The top should be Wireframe by default, which is what I use. If it's not, F3 toggles shading/texturing/fill and F4 toggles the wireframes. (When I say wireframes, I mean the crazy colorful grid-like lines on the body.)
The reason I do this is because some bones can be seen in the normal view (with the shading on), but there are some that are inside of the body that can't normally be seen. You don't *have* to have your screens like this, but it's how I work; I just thought it would be helpful to share. Anyway, I just said "bones." Let me explain that.
To do the posing, you'll be manipulating the bones. (The bones can also be collectively referred to as rigging.) These are the bits that sort of control how the outside model moves. They make animation possible. The bones are the whitish/greyish lines that jut out from the model at all different angles. You can see them all over models' faces and everything. It's important that you do not delete any of these bones. If you do, you could break the rigging system. They are built upon hierarchies (dependencies), and if you get rid of a parent bone, then its children won't cooperate properly with the rest of the body.
For example, the arm bone controls and wrist and fingers. Then, the shoulder bone controls the arm, which controls the wrist and fingers. If you deleted the arm and then tried to move the shoulder, the wrist and fingers wouldn't move since the hierarchy system was broken.So, actually doing the posing is really fairly simple and straightforward process. It just takes time and a lot of tweaking to get the right result.
So, just to dig right in...
- Click on the big spearlike bone jutting out of the model's shoulder. (Regardless of which model you're working with, as long as it's a humanoid character, it will have a shoulder bone. It may be kind of hard to find due to bulkiness of the model, in which case, you'll want to use the wireframe view to find it.)
- When you click on it, you should see the name of the bone in the side bar. In my case, it's "LeftShoulder." (It may be "RightShoulder" if that's what you grabbed.)
- Hit the E key to switch over to the rotate tool.
- You should see your tool switch over to a bunch of overlapping circles. Those circles are just the different axises (or axes, I'm not sure, hah) on which you can rotate.
- So, if you click an axis and pull, the arm moves.
That's the whole name of the game, just rotating bones.
You can also just grab anywhere in the sphere to move things around freely without an axis.
There's a helpful thing I use when blocking out base posing. It's the Angle Snap feature. Just hit A for angle snap, and it'll snap at exact five degree increments. (I'm sure you can change this amount somewhere in the preferences, but honestly, I've never needed to.)
I usually use that to make sure the arms are even or legs, if they're sitting or something. Then, once I have them basically where they need to be, then I turn off angle snap and move things around to make things more organic.
People don't usually sit or stand evenly, and when they do, it's really noticeable since humans are accustomed to noticing symmetry. When a person's standing up straight and tall, it gets our attention because we associate it with having purpose, intent, and even looking for attention, like a drill sergeant or something would. So, it's important to get in those little asymmetrical details, like someone leaning back on a foot, if they're just standing talking. If someone's sitting, maybe they have one leg wider than the other, and their feet are pointed in slightly different directions.
That brings me to another point--the eyes. Your pose will look soulless and fake right away if your eyes are not right. It's important to take the eyes out of their default positions any time that you do a pose. (Unless you're going for a soulless or scared kind of look.) You want to adjust the eyes up or down or to the sides based on where the character should be looking. Also, lowering the eyelids helps to decrease this effect. Most people don't walk around with their eyelids wide open.
I'll show you a technique I use for getting to the eyes quickly, as it can be tricky to find them within the messy head wireframes.
- Tap the H key on your keyboard.
- Wait a second or two, as this takes a moment.
- A list should pop up with all the bones and parts that are currently in the scene. (If you have lights, cameras, etc. then those are listed as well.) This is the object lister (at least that's what I call it).
- If you click on the Name section header, it'll sort the things alphabetically by name. Just scroll down to Eyes. There's an Eye_Left and an Eye_Right. You have to rotate these independently. You can't just cheat and be lazy and rotate them both at the same time, since rotating multiple objects doesn't work like you think it would because the pivot points are different.
- To select one of the eyes, just click on one of them and click OK.
- OR you can double click on the name, that also works.
- Then you can use the rotate tool to move one of the eyes to wherever you need it to be looking. (Yeah, it'll always look derpy at first with one eye rotated and the other not. I can't help but giggle myself.)
Be sure to check it from all angles. Sometimes, the eyes will look like they're pointing in the same direction from one angle, but another angle will show that one may be off a bit, and if that happens, the expression won't look quite right. People pick up on eyes very quickly, which is why it's crucial to get them right.
Okay, now for eyelids. With eyelids, I go through the object lister and select both at the same time. But wait, I just said not to do that, right? Well, I don't rotate the eyelids. I actually just translate them down. So, let's do that.
- Hit H.
- Click on eyeBlink_Left.
- Then, hold ctrl and click on eyeBlink_Right. (If you don't already know, holding ctrl while clicking things allows you to select multiple things. Also, if you click on something, then hold shift and click something else, it'll select all the things from the first thing to the second clicked thing.)
- Click OK.
- Hit the W key to switch to the move tool. (I call it translate tool because I'm a programmer, so I kinda think in terms of math sometimes.)
- Then, you can just click the up arrow and drag to move the lids up or down depending on where you need them.
If you want to open or close the mouth, the jawBone bone is the one you want to rotate. I usually find this through the object lister.
Making the character smile or frown can be done through the LipCorner_Left and LipCorner_Right bones. They can be both/either rotated and/or translated, depending on what sort of look you're going for.
There are usually multiple neck bones with the character. The lower ones move the whole neck base, and the upper ones are more of a head pivot. I usually use the upper ones more so than the lower ones.
That's about all I can really think to say about posing. It's all about just moving things and seeing what they do. Some bones don't appear to do anything at all because they have different reasons for being there (like the Prop bone, which is sometimes an annoyance as it occasionally fools me into thinking that it's the elbow bone upon first glance).
Shepard doesn't like Mondays...although, in space it's hard to tell which day it is, so everyday feels like Monday.
The next topic for posing will cover how to import animations, as they can be useful for posing. See you there!
No comments:
Post a Comment