How to use character rigs in Blender - Blender Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now that our scene is ready, let's dive a little bit deeper and try to understand how we can manipulate all of Arthur's controls. The first thing we need to do is to left click on Arthur, go to object, go to relations and make a library override. You'll come up with a new okay dialogue, just click on that, and now you'll see Arthur turns dark orange, you can click one more time, so he is a light orange and go to object mode, pose mode. A lot to unpack here, what did we just do? A library override allows you to create local changes within this blender file that don't affect the other files. For example, if I wanted to change the color of Arthur shirt in his character file that change would propagate to this scene. But in this scene, if I wanted to say, move Arthur round and animate him, those changes would not go backwards. Linking makes sure that all of the scenes can talk to each other, and library overrides allows you to do local changes that don't affect everything else. It's a really handy way to animate while at the same time preserving all of the awesomeness of linking. The next thing are all the different modes that Blender has. There's a bunch of them, object mode, edit mode, pose mode. Each one provides different tools that allow you to manipulate your character or your scene in different ways. For example, in sculpting mode, you have a whole bunch of sculpting brushes that allow you to sculp the scene. In pose mode, you have a few extra tools that help you animate your character. Blender likes using different modes, so that way we don't have a bunch of tools all over the place. Pose mode is where we're going to be for the majority of this course. By switching to it, we can now select different parts of this character rig called controls, and then manipulate them. For example, if I click on this big red boxy chest, I can click on the rotate button and rotate it, or I can click on the move button and move it around or click on scale and scale our character. I can hit escape to cancel that, or I can go to pose, clear transform and clear out all of my changes. Now it's going to get a little cumbersome to click on every button, so I recommend learning the shortcuts, G for move R for rotate or RR there we go, to create an orbit rotate, Imma I have to do that a few times to see this icon and then S for scaling. The cool thing about Blender is you can actually hit G X and that will lock it to the x-axis or Y or Z. And I can do that with rotate as well can hit are R, X, Y, or Z. It actually gets even crazier, I could hit Z again, and that uses the local z-axis not the global z-axis, but that is going too crazy. Let's keep ourselves focused. Now the next thing I want to show you are all the cool controls. In fact, Arthur is a feature film quality rig with over 2000 controls. That's a lot to take in. So to organize them, we have an add-on called BlendRig5. Let's go to edit, preferences, click on add-ons and go to install and navigate to your exercise files shared folder directory, and then click on Arthur go to BlendRig_2.90.zip. Now just a quick note, I'm using Blender 2.90 you might be using 291, 292, 293. In general this add-on should work, if there is a breaking change though we'll work hard to make sure that this add-on is updated so you can use it. With this add-on selected, go ahead and click on install add-on. Now, if you don't see this pop-up here you can always just click here and type in B-L-E-N-R-I-G, BlenRig. And just go ahead and click that little check box, and while we're here go to save and load and go to Auto Run Python Scripts, and now close this out. An add-on is like a plugin inside of Blender. It allows you to extend the program in an almost infinite amount of ways and Auto Run Python Scripts ensures that the next time we open the scene, the add-on will run. Now at first, you might not notice anything different but if you see this little caret over here, I can click it or hit N and I have a new sub-menu come up on the right, and if I click on BlendRig 5's tab here, I'll see a whole bunch of new things. I can left click and drag this over here, on that edge and middle mouse hold and look at all the cool stuff that's in here. As I said before, there are literally 2000 plus controls and these are all the layers that manage them. I can turn on extra face controls, for example, or different fingers. Now there's a lot to unpack with this character. So what I want you to do for the next two minutes is go ahead and play with all of his controls, move them around with G or R or S and see what cool things you can do, when you feel prepared let's move on to the next lesson where we talk about setting a key frame.