*Important regarding Pose Library* 17:28: Make sure the "Pose Library" addon is enabled in *Edit > Preferences > Addons!* It ships with Blender but it may or may not be enabled by defualt.
I just wanted to drop in and say thank you for all of the amazing videos. Your knowledge and content truly helped me through a tough grind trying to understand rigs, weights and animation options. You rock!!
Oh nice. So many of my go to people are doing Blender 4 videos. I haven’t been messed with my current project rigs/ armatures yet. I may not. Nothing has broken that I can see. This is a great video. Important stuff.
Thanks for covering this! Finally weight painting is more consistent with the other painting modes, that was such a huge pain all the time. Also my uneducated guess about what sample group does is: it checks what vertex roughly lies under your mouse and then selects the bone (or vertex group) that has the most influence over said vertex. In my case with a rig, it actually brought up a menu where I could choose one of the groups that had influence over the vertex. It's kinda like alt-clicking for weights.
Thanks for the input. So what would sample group be useful for? It must be solving some sort of problem. I just can't think of anything off the top of my head.
@@CGDive I think it's mainly if you have a chaotic rig with overlapping or small bones so you don't have to find and click on the right one. Instead you use that shortcut on a part you know is influenced by it. It's also probably more general purpose too since can use weights for lots of stuff outside of rigging. So instead of having to search through the vertex groups menu to find the right one you can use this shortcut. At least those are my guesses.
@@CGDive I was curious also. I guess the others answered already, but I'd still like to complement: I've just found out this *Sample Group Operator* , is just the new Shortcut [ Shift+Ctrl+X ] that substitutes the previous [ Shift+RMB-Click ] functionality on Weight Paint Mode (e.g., on Blender 3.6), which allowed to Select (or just verify) Vertex Group(s) from a Context Menu, popup list ("Weight Paint Vertex Group"), from the position of the Mouse (I believe it focus on the nearest Vertex from the Mouse to recognize Vertex Groups involved in it); this Vertex Group Selection ignores the Bone Selection, because it's another way (a more generic way) of inspecting Vertex Groups. However, just to contextualize a bit more (because I've found practical uses for it in Rigging 3D Characters): This Selection by Vertex Group, instead of by Bone, is relevant because not all Vertex Groups on a Mesh are necessarily Deform Bone -related; some Vertex Groups can be created for other purposes, like Object Modifiers, Targets, Mesh Selection 'backups' for merely organizational purposes, etc., and then they wouldn't be able to be directly Selected on Weight Paint Mode in the Viewport Editor, if it weren't for such functionality (since it's not Bone-related); it's also relevant to inspect how many Vertex Groups (of whichever kind) are existing in a single Vertex on the Mesh --even though not all the listed Vertex Groups that might be present, are necessarily sharing Weight Paint Ratio; only the Vertex Groups which are Deform Bone -related would be doing that (Blender Weights) from that single Vertex's perspective. Sure, it still can get confusing to handle these stuff in Weight Paint Mode, because sometimes we're not sure if the previewing Vertex Group on the Weight Paint -colored Mesh, is from a Deform Bone, or from a 'regular' kind of Vertex Group (that doesn't rely on a Deform Bone); if there were a more immediate differentiation between those Vertex Groups, both in the 3D Viewport Editor on Weight Paint Mode and in the Vertex Groups Panel (Properties Editor), this would help avoiding confusion that may happen; especially when a Selected Bone is not matching the previewing Weight Painting on the Mesh because we did this or that!
I had tried to do this over and over with many different tutorials and none of them worked until now. I finally have my first real game asset, THANK YOU!
The NLA duplicate changed because we are duplicating the Strip, and in the old system it was duplicating the Strip and the action and creating a pile of actions without anyone knowing...so this limits the creating of a mess of extra actions all over the file. Butterworth filter lets you smooth peaks and spikes but not loose the volume of the curve shape, unlike smoothing where you soften the animation or change the pose from it.
Ive been looking for this. I kept find outdated vids that talked about layers. Which wasnt shown . so i had to make sure to put 4.0 in the search bar and low and behold here i is. Thank you good sir. Now let me get back to watching the video
Something about your videos, weather it be your voice or the formatting really puts me to sleep. As someone with bad sleeping problems I find them really good at putting me to sleep whenever I need to. So Tyvm! If I had the money rn id sub to your stuff. Your rigify courses have been incredibly useful to me as well, and makes rigging much easier for me.
hahaha, at first I thought this was a subtle dis but by the end of the comment I wasn't so sure :D I have trouble sleeping well occasionally so I am happy if I can help you sleep better. And I am glad the Rigify stuff has been useful :)
not gonna lie, when I heard that there are new updates about animation in Blender , you are the only one I think of and wait for because you do really dive deep into animation in Blender so youur though on the updates will actually be helpful.
Good video, compact and comprehensive - and thanks for not polluting it with annoying backroung music! I am again amazed how great Blender is - and it's freakin' free. Compare it to payed software - Photoshop for instance - it comes accross more organized and accessible while incorporating a much bigger set of features. The Blender team continously works on getting rid of old cumbersome legacy and introducing new features at the same time - kudos!
they should bring the pose library back to how it was before, someone should tell Blender devs that changing things in the UI to make them more unnecesarily convoluted is not mandatory
Saving incrementally has worked for years now semi-manually, if you saved your file with name file_001 (separator can be any char), then there is -/+ key next to save button in Save As window, pressing that would increment or decrement the number in your file name, then you could press save. But of course it is nice to have it in file menu directly. Edit / it is also slightly stupid name - Maya and some other software called it "increment and save" which describes it better. It is not doing any "incremental changes" or saving differences since previous files, it simply changes file name's running numbering and saves another file.
have followed your vid for years now, and still the most comprehensive way to learn rigging in blender. Keep referencing them whenever I'm stuck. Would love a good update on the rigify or autorig pro to export into game engines vid. I still struggle to create good rigs for UE5, and I keep flipping between the two
Hey, thanks! Which videos and what kind of updates do you have in mind? The Blender to Game Engines workflows should still work. So I am trying to understand what kind of problems you are trying to solve.
The first 15 seconds was my pure reaction once they got rid of the old bone layers system. Although I am gonna miss using the bone layer manager addon. And two, they changed so much in blender 4.0, which feels like a sequel than a DLC with a completely revamped key map that I had to start completely fresh. I think they changed a bit much, IMO. Plus, the new modifier tab sucks
Is the Bone Layer manager going to be discontinued? I can imagine that it can keep providing additional functionality on top of the core improvements. I think one of the important features of Bone Layer manager was creating a rig menu which is still not provided by default.
Thanks for all the info! Did you ask the devs about that sample group feature? Sometimes they miss updating the documentation, I usually reach to them in the chat channels when I stumble upon such mysterious stuff. Also you could have switched shortcuts between save & b-bones instead of disabling the save shortcut 😅
Thanks for going over the pose library updates. Do you have any ideas as to moving or pasting a full body pose on a character that has moved. If I create a full body pose and want to paste it at the end of a movement, the character will snap back to where I originally created that full body pose.
I have a problem where I do not see the bones, only in edit mode. I need to weight paint certain areas of my mesh but I can't because there is no bone to select. What is the problem? I create a new file and the same thing happens. When I use an older version, the bones are there. So, what exactly is 4.0 doing that is removing the visibility of the bones?
Wow, eagle eyes hahah I was trying to learn GN and I was finding it difficult so I came up with this idea to abstract useful node combinations into "recipes" and save them as Assets that I can access any time. I got distracted and haven't gone deep into GN yet but I think the learning approach itself has good potential.
sample group is how you got the old menu up.. for sampling what groups are assigned to an area. Here's how it works: - have a bone selected - hit the shortcut.. whilst having your mouse somewhere over the mesh .. a small menu will appear showing you all bones near the vert with weight assigned
@@CGDive great video btw... I came to watch this video because the hotkey had changed and I wanted to use this exact feature -- but didn't know what it was called :D Very helpful that you have chaptered up the video to cover the 'weight paint section' too... Thanks, great video again!
Thank you for the update! I am curious, how will this affect parenting a rigify face rig to a mixamo rig? In your original tutorial, you described how to move the bones to the correct bone layers. How do we adjust them in 4.0? I'm guessing this is covered in a separate video? :D Thank you again!
Let me know when Blender can automatically attach animation pose controls to any arbitrary existing armature without needing to literally create a whole second armature. Closest thing to Cascadeur handling, if you want to just animate an existing character that is already weight-painted to an existing armature, is the combination of not one but two paid plugins (Auto Rig Pro + Auto Rig Pro Quick Rig).
There is an addon called "1 click rig". Not sure if it is being updated tho artempoletsky.gumroad.com/l/FsiLK There is also a paid one on Blender Market called "Any rig to Rigify". blendermarket.com/products/any-rig-to-rigify I think there are more. I am planning to make a video about such tools, just haven't had the time yet.
Amazing video! just a question, because I am totally new to Blender.. will your course teach how to make models/objects bigger? for example : animating a girl growing taller. Thanks for your time!
Hey CGDive, this isn't relevant to the video, but can you teach us how to make a moveable center of gravity bone for characters? i saw a maya video where you can tweak characters pivot for rotation etc. using a bone which you can place anywhere so i was wondering if it is possible in blender?
press shift + left click to select a bone in edit mode. >> was this always like this? I noticed in pose mode you can just select any bone without shift>?
Thanks for the demo. Bone collection ; As we can see, we can't export bone collection to a file, to import/export collection into another blend file. Also, I'm curious if the data will follow on Linked Rig file. If not, you have to redo the sets every single time.
We can't export/import collections? I don't follow. How do you expect to do that and what for? As for linking, yes of course you collections will come through. They won't be editable aside from hiding/unhiding in the linked state but you can add more collections through overrides from what I understand.
@@CGDive in a blend animation file, if i make a specific set for example; export_bones and IK_Controls, if i open another blend animation file with same rig, i want to be able to import these sets into the bone collection. Issue is that sharing assets between blend files does not work properly, poses are missing, does not refresh, etc. Devs said they're gonna improve that in the futur, but that's why as an animator i'm still not using the asset browser for my poses and i'm scared that it will be the same for bone collection.
As Blender Character animator I have to be brutally honest. These animation “improvements” are extremely weak particularly the NLA which remains far behind the motion clip system of apps like Reallusion iclone & Maya. The animation layers add-on ,from Blender market, makes the NLA redundant and its functionality is something that the Blender devs should have emulated instead making ornamental changes to the decrepid legacy NLA. sure the bone management updates are good but I use ARP rigs which has its own proxy picker panel so again, for character animators like me, there really is not alot for me to get excited enough about Blender 4 to update just yet.
Also honest: since I spent some time learning the NLA properly, I actually don't find the Animation Layers that useful. I mean I know it's an awesome addon that many people swear by. But I could already do what I want in the vanilla NLA so AL seemed like just another tool to learn. That is the main reason I don't have a video about it even though people have been requesting it a lot. Lots of good stuff is in the works for rigging and animation tho. Stay tuned!
Its best to stick with whatever makes you comfortable but in many ways even the Daz aniblock system is superior to the Blender NLA IMHO and Iclone’s system is far superior. I may do my own comparison video this weekend. what I like most about the animation layers addon is the ability to select any bone/s and extract them to their own discreet layer which makes it much easier to animate non humanoid creatures with tails and other appendages along with the ability to key frame the influence of any layer at any point in the timeline.@@CGDive
Hey, Todor. Do you think your Game Rig Tools addon can get an update for Blender 4.0 soon? Because I've really enjoyed using it and need the addon for one of my rigs.
The Game Rig Tools addon, as is mentioned on the store page, isn't really fully compatible with v4.0. I know it'll take some time to get it up and running again, but do you have a rough estimate as to how long you expect that to take? I'd assume at least a few weeks, but if it looks like it'll take longer that'd be great to know.
Thank you for sharing! I just playing around with Blender 4.0. However, when I attempted to link some character rigs from Blender 3.5 to the current version, my Blender kept force closing for some unknown reason
I wouldn't say that's unexpected. Bring your base blend files to Blender 4.0 and convert them successfully to the new version. (keep backup copies of the 3.6 version of course!) Once that is done, try to link them into a new 4.0 scene. If that doesn't work, then you should submit a bug report.
Hi CGDive Im a Blender user with UE5. Could you help me with which of your video tutorials to start with? There are so many videos from you, it's unbelievable. But I need a video that I seriously want to master rigging for Blender and UE5. Which of your videos would you highly recommend? Thx for your help
Hi, if you want to rig, I have playlists for Rigify and Auto-Rig Pro. Hope this helps! Enjoy. Rigify ua-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJv68SSdwxip33M7snakl6Dx.html Auto-Rig Pro ua-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJuHJFQgb4altQWs-RCKA7Bq.html
Hi, really enjoy your videos! Quick question, if I have a rigify rig that I've adapted in 3.6 (added extra bones and constraints so it's a hybrid of rigify and my own rig) how can I update to 4.0? Regenerating the rig isn't an option in this case as I'd lose a ton of work. Is there a fix on the horizon? Would love to advance to 4.0 but this is stopping that.
Hi. I don't know yet but feel free to email me if you can share your 3.6 file for testing. I am working on a guide for Rigify users transitioning from 3.6 to 4.0. Your case is not exactly the main thing I want to cover but it could be an interesting case study of a more complex transition.
It's brand new so it's not set in stone but e.g. in Edit Mode you could color code your Deform bones in one color, MCH bones that have different purposes can be grouped with different colors etc. And in Pose mode the controls can be color coded as they have been in previous versions of Blender such as different colors for IK vs FK, left side vs right side etc. So Edit Mode colors are more of a tool for the rigger and pose mode colors for the animator.
How select bone in Weight Paint mode face/vertex selection? Blender 2.79 can, but 4.0 cant? And problem with selection of overlapping or occluded Bones. Years waitings and we have only disappointment. With such development freeness loses meaning
@@CGDivei use Select With Left mouse, In weight paint mode in Face selection - CTRL+Left-click select bone, SHIFT+Left click - select faces. Just open old blender and try)
Does anyone know of an addon to replace the blender installation system? just to finally be able to save the poses without having to learn the same things each time with each new update since apparently they change their pose system each time.
They haven't changed the pose system. Also I don't understand how "the blender installation system" has anything to do with it (or what that means for that matter).
It's very common for addons to break when a big new version is released. Most likely they will be fixed within a couple of weeks so keep an eye out for updates.
@@canyongoat2096 Pose library wasn't active by default? That's weird. When making the video I set everything to factory default and checked the addons and it seemed to be on,
It's not updated yet because 4.0 was a big release with a lot of changes. Blendeboi said he'll be working on it. We'll announce it as soon as it's ready/
Here you go. Watch videos 2 and 3 regarding the NLA editor and also video 1 if you need even more basic intro to the animation system ua-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJvaLgirnTuH8-4Ro5Ou-YsZ.html
@@fkdump guys, the NLA is Animation Layers. The workflow/UX can be better but it is a powerful way to layer, mix, and edit animations. It may take you a couple of days to learn but that is better than waiting for months or a year until the new and improved features arrive (yes, they are planned and devs are working on them). Check out my NLA videos if you want a quick start guide ua-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJvaLgirnTuH8-4Ro5Ou-YsZ.html
This update is horrible. It breaks things without really improving functionality and shuffles existing features around without a real purpose. So much effort was wasted in adding colors to the graph editor, making bone collections and adding trivial work flow changes to weight painting. As a longtime professional animator and rigger, these improvements are not improvements. The long needed core level animation layer system still doesn't exist, the NLA editor doesn't allow interactive changes to strips but still requires a new strip to be made when it's edited, shape key and bone animation are still not integrated, there are still no Animation Nodes while the Geometry Node wankfest is in full force. And it breaks Rigify. Regenerating a new Rigify rig when you have a bunch of custom constraints on it for prop handling is a production disaster. As an animator/rigger, I see no reason to update to 4.x. It only breaks things, doesn't improve anything in any real sense, and is horrible in so many fundamental ways it's hard to believe thought was put into any of it.
I haven't used this in a long time and its no wonder i have spent all day to get exactly no where trying to paste a animation on a rigged model. This thing instead of improving has actually become much worse as far as the UI its completely unintelligible and insanely aggrivating. The camera is enough to make me want to punch the screen wow 30 years of fps video games and we dont have the simple ability that every demo app ever had to move the camera like a fps game. The selection of things is ridiculously difficult a magic key combination no tool tips and no visual way to do things makes this sooooo difficult to do even basic things. The rigging hasn't even gotten better and trying to move a animations bones manually to a pre-rigged skeleton must have wasted millions of user hours for something any decent math guy could write a algorithm to do automatically once the bones are mapped. Blender is the best converter from file types their is though thanks.
*Important regarding Pose Library* 17:28: Make sure the "Pose Library" addon is enabled in *Edit > Preferences > Addons!* It ships with Blender but it may or may not be enabled by defualt.
It's enabled by default, I made sure of that ;-)
@Yeah, that's what I thought too but I think someone said it wasn't so pinned that there.
I can almost taste the amount of joy he radiated within that first 10 seconds alone! Bye Bye old bone shenanigans!
Haha yes. I've rarely been so excited about a new feature 😁
@@CGDive 🤩🤩🤩
I just wanted to drop in and say thank you for all of the amazing videos. Your knowledge and content truly helped me through a tough grind trying to understand rigs, weights and animation options. You rock!!
Wow, thanks a bunch. Means a lot to me!
That would be so nice to see Automatic Weights being improved with some options to avoid the classical "bone weight failure" thing. Nice review btw!
Thanks!
Regarding bone heat: ua-cam.com/video/FuiY0wtxdHQ/v-deo.html
:D
Oh nice. So many of my go to people are doing Blender 4 videos. I haven’t been messed with my current project rigs/ armatures yet. I may not. Nothing has broken that I can see. This is a great video. Important stuff.
Wonderful coverage of all the new functions. Great video!
Many thanks!
Thanks for covering this! Finally weight painting is more consistent with the other painting modes, that was such a huge pain all the time. Also my uneducated guess about what sample group does is: it checks what vertex roughly lies under your mouse and then selects the bone (or vertex group) that has the most influence over said vertex. In my case with a rig, it actually brought up a menu where I could choose one of the groups that had influence over the vertex. It's kinda like alt-clicking for weights.
Thanks for the input. So what would sample group be useful for? It must be solving some sort of problem. I just can't think of anything off the top of my head.
@@CGDive I think it's mainly if you have a chaotic rig with overlapping or small bones so you don't have to find and click on the right one. Instead you use that shortcut on a part you know is influenced by it.
It's also probably more general purpose too since can use weights for lots of stuff outside of rigging.
So instead of having to search through the vertex groups menu to find the right one you can use this shortcut.
At least those are my guesses.
@@CGDive I was curious also. I guess the others answered already, but I'd still like to complement: I've just found out this *Sample Group Operator* , is just the new Shortcut [ Shift+Ctrl+X ] that substitutes the previous [ Shift+RMB-Click ] functionality on Weight Paint Mode (e.g., on Blender 3.6), which allowed to Select (or just verify) Vertex Group(s) from a Context Menu, popup list ("Weight Paint Vertex Group"), from the position of the Mouse (I believe it focus on the nearest Vertex from the Mouse to recognize Vertex Groups involved in it); this Vertex Group Selection ignores the Bone Selection, because it's another way (a more generic way) of inspecting Vertex Groups.
However, just to contextualize a bit more (because I've found practical uses for it in Rigging 3D Characters): This Selection by Vertex Group, instead of by Bone, is relevant because not all Vertex Groups on a Mesh are necessarily Deform Bone -related; some Vertex Groups can be created for other purposes, like Object Modifiers, Targets, Mesh Selection 'backups' for merely organizational purposes, etc., and then they wouldn't be able to be directly Selected on Weight Paint Mode in the Viewport Editor, if it weren't for such functionality (since it's not Bone-related); it's also relevant to inspect how many Vertex Groups (of whichever kind) are existing in a single Vertex on the Mesh --even though not all the listed Vertex Groups that might be present, are necessarily sharing Weight Paint Ratio; only the Vertex Groups which are Deform Bone -related would be doing that (Blender Weights) from that single Vertex's perspective. Sure, it still can get confusing to handle these stuff in Weight Paint Mode, because sometimes we're not sure if the previewing Vertex Group on the Weight Paint -colored Mesh, is from a Deform Bone, or from a 'regular' kind of Vertex Group (that doesn't rely on a Deform Bone); if there were a more immediate differentiation between those Vertex Groups, both in the 3D Viewport Editor on Weight Paint Mode and in the Vertex Groups Panel (Properties Editor), this would help avoiding confusion that may happen; especially when a Selected Bone is not matching the previewing Weight Painting on the Mesh because we did this or that!
I had tried to do this over and over with many different tutorials and none of them worked until now. I finally have my first real game asset, THANK YOU!
The NLA duplicate changed because we are duplicating the Strip, and in the old system it was duplicating the Strip and the action and creating a pile of actions without anyone knowing...so this limits the creating of a mess of extra actions all over the file.
Butterworth filter lets you smooth peaks and spikes but not loose the volume of the curve shape, unlike smoothing where you soften the animation or change the pose from it.
Ive been looking for this. I kept find outdated vids that talked about layers. Which wasnt shown . so i had to make sure to put 4.0 in the search bar and low and behold here i is. Thank you good sir. Now let me get back to watching the video
Enjoy!
So many improvements! And most are for animation. But without this channel I'd be lost. This channel should be called CGlighthouse. 😊
Something about your videos, weather it be your voice or the formatting really puts me to sleep. As someone with bad sleeping problems I find them really good at putting me to sleep whenever I need to. So Tyvm! If I had the money rn id sub to your stuff. Your rigify courses have been incredibly useful to me as well, and makes rigging much easier for me.
hahaha, at first I thought this was a subtle dis but by the end of the comment I wasn't so sure :D
I have trouble sleeping well occasionally so I am happy if I can help you sleep better.
And I am glad the Rigify stuff has been useful :)
Yeah I didn't know how else to put it lol but you're stuff is the best. @@CGDive
Thanks for the mention!
Sure thing, great videos!
not gonna lie, when I heard that there are new updates about animation in Blender , you are the only one I think of and wait for because you do really dive deep into animation in Blender so youur though on the updates will actually be helpful.
Thanks, mate! Glad you enjoy the CGDive style :D
Good video, compact and comprehensive - and thanks for not polluting it with annoying backroung music!
I am again amazed how great Blender is - and it's freakin' free.
Compare it to payed software - Photoshop for instance - it comes accross more organized and accessible while incorporating a much bigger set of features.
The Blender team continously works on getting rid of old cumbersome legacy and introducing new features at the same time - kudos!
they should bring the pose library back to how it was before, someone should tell Blender devs that changing things in the UI to make them more unnecesarily convoluted is not mandatory
Thank you for all of the knowledge you gave us. Hope you make a video about workflow with Cascadeur+Blender
Finally, I can now select the bone layer(collection) immediately without wasting time guessing which layer I'm looking for 😅
Saving incrementally has worked for years now semi-manually, if you saved your file with name file_001 (separator can be any char), then there is -/+ key next to save button in Save As window, pressing that would increment or decrement the number in your file name, then you could press save. But of course it is nice to have it in file menu directly. Edit / it is also slightly stupid name - Maya and some other software called it "increment and save" which describes it better. It is not doing any "incremental changes" or saving differences since previous files, it simply changes file name's running numbering and saves another file.
Great overview, very informative... Cheers M8 !
have followed your vid for years now, and still the most comprehensive way to learn rigging in blender. Keep referencing them whenever I'm stuck.
Would love a good update on the rigify or autorig pro to export into game engines vid. I still struggle to create good rigs for UE5, and I keep flipping between the two
Hey, thanks!
Which videos and what kind of updates do you have in mind? The Blender to Game Engines workflows should still work. So I am trying to understand what kind of problems you are trying to solve.
Had to watch a couple times to figure out how to weight paint in blender 4. Thanks.
You are amazing. Still need to finish your rigging courses. I have been doing a lot of stuff lately and forgot about rigging.
Thanks and good luck with the courses! Let me know if you need help. Sure to the changes in 4.0 some things may not work.
The first 15 seconds was my pure reaction once they got rid of the old bone layers system. Although I am gonna miss using the bone layer manager addon. And two, they changed so much in blender 4.0, which feels like a sequel than a DLC with a completely revamped key map that I had to start completely fresh. I think they changed a bit much, IMO. Plus, the new modifier tab sucks
Is the Bone Layer manager going to be discontinued? I can imagine that it can keep providing additional functionality on top of the core improvements. I think one of the important features of Bone Layer manager was creating a rig menu which is still not provided by default.
@CGDive I saw that it was unsupported for blender 4.0 on the gumroad page, but I don't know if it's going to be discontinued yet
@@9b8ll Well, it's very early. A lot of addons are broken in 4.0 now (ours are still not working either). Hope they continue to develop it!
Weight painting changes are great, makes repetitive stuff way easier.
Thanks for all the info! Did you ask the devs about that sample group feature? Sometimes they miss updating the documentation, I usually reach to them in the chat channels when I stumble upon such mysterious stuff. Also you could have switched shortcuts between save & b-bones instead of disabling the save shortcut 😅
and I donno why the NLA strip drag improvement is the change that made me most joyful 😅
Yeah, totally tweak the keymap as you like.
As for "sample group", I wasn't interested enough, I guess.
yeah, the NLA stuff is nice. The less papercuts, the better.
My fav is obviously bone collections :D
Thanks for going over the pose library updates. Do you have any ideas as to moving or pasting a full body pose on a character that has moved. If I create a full body pose and want to paste it at the end of a movement, the character will snap back to where I originally created that full body pose.
Hi ,Thanks for this video. Hugely useful as always. there does seem to be a typo mistake at 9.20 though. Selected bone color should be 50C8FF
Yes, you might be right. Typos are my nemesis 😭
Very helpful and thorough.
Glad you liked it!
I have a problem where I do not see the bones, only in edit mode. I need to weight paint certain areas of my mesh but I can't because there is no bone to select. What is the problem? I create a new file and the same thing happens. When I use an older version, the bones are there. So, what exactly is 4.0 doing that is removing the visibility of the bones?
SO MUCH BETTER.
It will probably break half of my plugins. I will wait a bit.
yep, that is true :)
Great video as always! What's that you've got there in geonodes recipes? 👀
Wow, eagle eyes hahah
I was trying to learn GN and I was finding it difficult so I came up with this idea to abstract useful node combinations into "recipes" and save them as Assets that I can access any time. I got distracted and haven't gone deep into GN yet but I think the learning approach itself has good potential.
sample group is how you got the old menu up.. for sampling what groups are assigned to an area. Here's how it works:
- have a bone selected
- hit the shortcut.. whilst having your mouse somewhere over the mesh
.. a small menu will appear showing you all bones near the vert with weight assigned
Makes sense. Cheers!
@@CGDive great video btw... I came to watch this video because the hotkey had changed and I wanted to use this exact feature -- but didn't know what it was called :D
Very helpful that you have chaptered up the video to cover the 'weight paint section' too... Thanks, great video again!
@@Stiltonator nice, glad you found it useful! :)
Hey Tudor… will we still ever get an x-muscle system deep dive? Perhaps how to integrate it with rigify?
Can't say it's something that is coming soon, sorry.
Thank you for the update! I am curious, how will this affect parenting a rigify face rig to a mixamo rig? In your original tutorial, you described how to move the bones to the correct bone layers. How do we adjust them in 4.0? I'm guessing this is covered in a separate video? :D Thank you again!
I haven't tested it yet. My guess is that you can still move the bones to a different collection. Same workflow.
Regarding nested collections at 5:10 : yup, that's what we're working on right now!
Looking forward to it!
Let me know when Blender can automatically attach animation pose controls to any arbitrary existing armature without needing to literally create a whole second armature. Closest thing to Cascadeur handling, if you want to just animate an existing character that is already weight-painted to an existing armature, is the combination of not one but two paid plugins (Auto Rig Pro + Auto Rig Pro Quick Rig).
There is an addon called "1 click rig". Not sure if it is being updated tho
artempoletsky.gumroad.com/l/FsiLK
There is also a paid one on Blender Market called "Any rig to Rigify".
blendermarket.com/products/any-rig-to-rigify
I think there are more. I am planning to make a video about such tools, just haven't had the time yet.
Great video time to update my rig
Amazing video! just a question, because I am totally new to Blender.. will your course teach how to make models/objects bigger? for example : animating a girl growing taller. Thanks for your time!
No, that is not covered. I will make a note about it to possibly include it in an intermediate/advanced course.
@@CGDiveThanks for your answer! appreciate to see you take note!
Amazing video, ty❤
You're welcome 😊
Ty!
Hey CGDive, this isn't relevant to the video, but can you teach us how to make a moveable center of gravity bone for characters? i saw a maya video where you can tweak characters pivot for rotation etc. using a bone which you can place anywhere so i was wondering if it is possible in blender?
press shift + left click to select a bone in edit mode. >> was this always like this? I noticed in pose mode you can just select any bone without shift>?
Just a simple left click seems to work for me in and mode
really needed this, thanks!
the best as usual T
Thanks, mate!
never used layerboxes, had no idea what they did
Thanks for the demo. Bone collection ; As we can see, we can't export bone collection to a file, to import/export collection into another blend file. Also, I'm curious if the data will follow on Linked Rig file. If not, you have to redo the sets every single time.
We can't export/import collections? I don't follow. How do you expect to do that and what for?
As for linking, yes of course you collections will come through. They won't be editable aside from hiding/unhiding in the linked state but you can add more collections through overrides from what I understand.
@@CGDive in a blend animation file, if i make a specific set for example; export_bones and IK_Controls, if i open another blend animation file with same rig, i want to be able to import these sets into the bone collection. Issue is that sharing assets between blend files does not work properly, poses are missing, does not refresh, etc. Devs said they're gonna improve that in the futur, but that's why as an animator i'm still not using the asset browser for my poses and i'm scared that it will be the same for bone collection.
I like gradient radial
Please make a video about rigify 🙏
I should do, yeah!
As Blender Character animator I have to be brutally honest.
These animation “improvements” are extremely weak
particularly the NLA which remains far behind the motion clip system of apps like Reallusion iclone & Maya.
The animation layers add-on ,from Blender market, makes the NLA redundant
and its functionality is something that the Blender devs should have emulated instead making ornamental changes to the decrepid legacy NLA.
sure the bone management updates are good but I use ARP rigs which has its own proxy picker panel so again, for character animators like me, there really is not alot for me to get excited enough about Blender 4 to update just yet.
Also honest: since I spent some time learning the NLA properly, I actually don't find the Animation Layers that useful. I mean I know it's an awesome addon that many people swear by. But I could already do what I want in the vanilla NLA so AL seemed like just another tool to learn. That is the main reason I don't have a video about it even though people have been requesting it a lot.
Lots of good stuff is in the works for rigging and animation tho. Stay tuned!
Its best to stick with whatever makes you comfortable
but in many ways even the Daz aniblock system is superior to the
Blender NLA IMHO and Iclone’s system is far superior.
I may do my own comparison video this weekend.
what I like most about the animation layers addon is the ability
to select any bone/s and extract them to their own discreet layer
which makes it much easier to animate non humanoid creatures with tails
and other appendages along with the ability to key frame the influence
of any layer at any point in the timeline.@@CGDive
@@AutodidactAnimotions Awesome, look forward to the video. Let me check my subscription to you! :)
The problem for me with NLA is that if there are multiple rigs in a scene it will get a big stack of rig list
Hey, Todor. Do you think your Game Rig Tools addon can get an update for Blender 4.0 soon? Because I've really enjoyed using it and need the addon for one of my rigs.
I know blenderboi is working on it. We will release it as soon as it's ready!
The Game Rig Tools addon, as is mentioned on the store page, isn't really fully compatible with v4.0. I know it'll take some time to get it up and running again, but do you have a rough estimate as to how long you expect that to take? I'd assume at least a few weeks, but if it looks like it'll take longer that'd be great to know.
A few weeks sounds reasonable but I am not developing the addon myself so it is hard to give an ETA.
@@CGDive Makes sense. Thanks so much for the reply! Your content has been an absolute lifesaver.
i couldnt get holding control and clicking and dragging to mirror the pose. did that change in 4.0?
I am not sure but it doesn't work for me either. I will check.
Thank you for sharing!
I just playing around with Blender 4.0. However, when I attempted to link some character rigs from Blender 3.5 to the current version, my Blender kept force closing for some unknown reason
I wouldn't say that's unexpected. Bring your base blend files to Blender 4.0 and convert them successfully to the new version. (keep backup copies of the 3.6 version of course!)
Once that is done, try to link them into a new 4.0 scene. If that doesn't work, then you should submit a bug report.
Hi CGDive Im a Blender user with UE5. Could you help me with which of your video tutorials to start with? There are so many videos from you, it's unbelievable. But I need a video that I seriously want to master rigging for Blender and UE5. Which of your videos would you highly recommend? Thx for your help
Hi, if you want to rig, I have playlists for Rigify and Auto-Rig Pro. Hope this helps! Enjoy.
Rigify
ua-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJv68SSdwxip33M7snakl6Dx.html
Auto-Rig Pro
ua-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJuHJFQgb4altQWs-RCKA7Bq.html
thx u very much. let's see :)@@CGDive
Hi, really enjoy your videos! Quick question, if I have a rigify rig that I've adapted in 3.6 (added extra bones and constraints so it's a hybrid of rigify and my own rig) how can I update to 4.0? Regenerating the rig isn't an option in this case as I'd lose a ton of work. Is there a fix on the horizon? Would love to advance to 4.0 but this is stopping that.
Hi. I don't know yet but feel free to email me if you can share your 3.6 file for testing. I am working on a guide for Rigify users transitioning from 3.6 to 4.0. Your case is not exactly the main thing I want to cover but it could be an interesting case study of a more complex transition.
@@CGDive Thanks Todor, I just sent you an email :)
6:34 what is the use case to have different colors in different modes?
It's brand new so it's not set in stone but e.g. in Edit Mode you could color code your Deform bones in one color, MCH bones that have different purposes can be grouped with different colors etc. And in Pose mode the controls can be color coded as they have been in previous versions of Blender such as different colors for IK vs FK, left side vs right side etc. So Edit Mode colors are more of a tool for the rigger and pose mode colors for the animator.
How select bone in Weight Paint mode face/vertex selection? Blender 2.79 can, but 4.0 cant? And problem with selection of overlapping or occluded Bones. Years waitings and we have only disappointment. With such development freeness loses meaning
Yeah, doesn't work. Was that possible in 2.79? I think if you use right click select it's supposed to work, no?
@@CGDivei use Select With Left mouse, In weight paint mode in Face selection - CTRL+Left-click select bone, SHIFT+Left click - select faces. Just open old blender and try)
@@FlowerPower3000 yeah, that's definitely a regression...
Do you have any insight as to why Mixamo doesn't work in 4.0, or am I doing something wrong? I haven't seen anybody address it.
It's not officially updated yet. I think it should be coming soonish tho.
I appreciate the response my friend! Keep up the great work.@@CGDive
Does anyone know of an addon to replace the blender installation system? just to finally be able to save the poses without having to learn the same things each time with each new update since apparently they change their pose system each time.
They haven't changed the pose system. Also I don't understand how "the blender installation system" has anything to do with it (or what that means for that matter).
Everything ok but the mixamo add on and dynamic parent constraint addons are not working with this 4.0 version, please explain about this?
It's very common for addons to break when a big new version is released. Most likely they will be fixed within a couple of weeks so keep an eye out for updates.
informative
That's the goal :}
for me the skeleton is just gone when checking layers and stuff
The pose shelf doesn't exist for me after updating from a scene from blender 3.0. How do I get the pose shelf thing on the bottom now???
So you are in pose mode and you click the triangle like in the video?
@@CGDive The triangle wasn't visible. I fixed it by now, I had to enable the Pose Library addon for it to show up so now it's working fine.
@@canyongoat2096 Pose library wasn't active by default? That's weird. When making the video I set everything to factory default and checked the addons and it seemed to be on,
@@CGDive It wasn't, I just downloaded Blender 4.0 not long ago. Maybe because I got the settings from previous install? It was Blender 3.0.
@@canyongoat2096 ah, damn!
my pose library is empty 🤷♀
Fit it with stuff! :)
Hey todor when are you making videos on cloud metarig
never
@@Last0wnerwhy bro
Will see. I heard it will start becoming a separate addon. Sounds interesting.
Hi, why game-rig tool, not working anymore in blender 4.0 ? Have you test it ?
It's not updated yet because 4.0 was a big release with a lot of changes. Blendeboi said he'll be working on it. We'll announce it as soon as it's ready/
@@CGDive Thank you so much for the reply! Luckily I still have blender 3.6 on the side to work with the add-on
What is the nla editor for animation? How works?
Here you go. Watch videos 2 and 3 regarding the NLA editor and also video 1 if you need even more basic intro to the animation system
ua-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJvaLgirnTuH8-4Ro5Ou-YsZ.html
Official addon mixamo not working correctly in 4.0 bone color & ect. So bad
yeah, I know. I am looking for a good fix and I will cover it when I can!
Hated those boxes. No kind of visual hint as to what the hell is going on.
Farewell old boxes. We won't miss you 😂
@@CGDive True. I usually kept clicking till something different happened.
how to install pose library
Pose Library comes pre-installed with Blender.
is animation layer coming?
I'm not quite sure what you mean to be honest.
If I memorize it right I think there is a video in blender's channel saying they will add animation layer in the future...
@@fkdump guys, the NLA is Animation Layers. The workflow/UX can be better but it is a powerful way to layer, mix, and edit animations. It may take you a couple of days to learn but that is better than waiting for months or a year until the new and improved features arrive (yes, they are planned and devs are working on them).
Check out my NLA videos if you want a quick start guide
ua-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJvaLgirnTuH8-4Ro5Ou-YsZ.html
@@CGDive Yes, I agree, I have been using it thinking it is not much different from maya's animation layers.
the previous feature was some bs :p
When I installed 4.0 my laptop 💻 dead😢😂
oh noooooo 😢😂
💪💥🗯🔥💭❤🕊
haha 😂👅🔥🌶
This update is horrible. It breaks things without really improving functionality and shuffles existing features around without a real purpose. So much effort was wasted in adding colors to the graph editor, making bone collections and adding trivial work flow changes to weight painting.
As a longtime professional animator and rigger, these improvements are not improvements. The long needed core level animation layer system still doesn't exist, the NLA editor doesn't allow interactive changes to strips but still requires a new strip to be made when it's edited, shape key and bone animation are still not integrated, there are still no Animation Nodes while the Geometry Node wankfest is in full force.
And it breaks Rigify. Regenerating a new Rigify rig when you have a bunch of custom constraints on it for prop handling is a production disaster.
As an animator/rigger, I see no reason to update to 4.x. It only breaks things, doesn't improve anything in any real sense, and is horrible in so many fundamental ways it's hard to believe thought was put into any of it.
alrightyyyyyyy
I haven't used this in a long time and its no wonder i have spent all day to get exactly no where trying to paste a animation on a rigged model. This thing instead of improving has actually become much worse as far as the UI its completely unintelligible and insanely aggrivating. The camera is enough to make me want to punch the screen wow 30 years of fps video games and we dont have the simple ability that every demo app ever had to move the camera like a fps game. The selection of things is ridiculously difficult a magic key combination no tool tips and no visual way to do things makes this sooooo difficult to do even basic things. The rigging hasn't even gotten better and trying to move a animations bones manually to a pre-rigged skeleton must have wasted millions of user hours for something any decent math guy could write a algorithm to do automatically once the bones are mapped. Blender is the best converter from file types their is though thanks.
thx