I was struggling to get the knee pole bone to follow along with the knee in a way that worked for me as I kept getting a lot of twisting in the shin and every solution I found online worked well with basic IK legs but not really with this amazing foot rig. I eventually came up with a pretty simple solution that so far seems to work quite well. I duplicated my MCH_IK_thigh bone so it is parented to the hip but not controlled by the IK chain, and then just put a damped track to aim it at the MCH_IK_shin.002, (the little ankle bones popping out the back that we used for the IK target) and used that as the parent for my pole vectors. It seems that the pole vectors follow the knee very nicely and don't add twist to my shins. Thanks for the amazing tutorials, I never would have been able to rig characters without this series!
@@Dikko You've taught me over 9000 tricks, so I guess we're even? Oh, BTW, "var" is almost certainly short for "variable," not "variance." Maybe I teach you two tricks.
My curve wasn't same as Dikko's (idk what went wrong haha) but you method solved the issue right away. thanks. I assume using min can do quite opposite?
This saved me a ton of time. Also, copying the drivers from left to right and just changing the name of the driving bone made rigging both feet a breeze.
I just want to say, I tried using rigify to do my model, and it was okay. But now that I'm seven videos in these tutorials, making my own rig, I understand how it all works, and my rig works better than the rigify one did, even my weights are working better after watching your videos on that. It just works, and that's so freaking cool
It's worth noting that you can copy constraints between bones. This is available under Pose > Constraints > Copy Constraints to Selected Bones Select the target bones first. Then select the bone with the constraints you need duplicated.
Amazing, your work not only makes the whole process very clear, but also inspires to get to it, do the rig and make it work! Is fun and inspiring. Thanks a million !!!
I had to watch this a few times to understand what is going on lol. I had done this kind of rig on one of my characters, but I completely forgot how to do it on another character i'm working on. Super helpful though, and it's an awesome rig too! Thanks for showing us how to do this! :)
Hey dikko, i'm having a problem with the foot heel driver. When i add it to the bone, the function i get is a straight vertical line, and when i convert the bottom handle to free type and manipulate it the way you did, all i get is the inverse result, where i can rotate towards the front, but not backwards. I really don't know where i messed up :/ EDIT: I was able to make it work. First i changed the MCH_IK_footHeelRot.L.001 roll in 180° ( Yours might be different) and then binded the foot heel controller to the driver. With this, I was able to change the function in the graph without changing the rotation of the controller (which was another problem that I was having, where the rotation of the controller was following the function bottom handle). Took me a little bit of time to figured it out, but I still don't know why the function i'm getting when i add the driver is pretty much vertical, while the one that dikko gets is diagonal :) EDIT2: The problem with the vertical function was just me and my dumb self not looking at the scale of the driver axis, when i zoomed enough in both axis, i was able to see that the function was correct ^^
Thanks, dude. Lots and lots of Infos and so good explained that the Brain can cope with all that drivers and parenting stuff.so good to see it working at the end. Triple Cheers to you
At the beginning I had the problem that my bone rotation was off and changing only the def bone rotation completely destroyed the mesh. First I thought I had to maybe unparent the Armature from the Mesh. But (in hindsight obviously) I just had to select the def and CTRL (IK & FK) bones and change their rotation at the same time. Probably obvious to the most, but maybe this helps someone :D Anyways, great tutorial as always Dikko! I fee like I'm getting a better understanding for rigging in general with each video. Thank you!
After building this pretty complicated foot rig, I spent, like, 6 hours trying to figure out what finally broke my rig. I could rotate everything, but I literally couldn't move anything in terms of translating the location of any bone. I had to go back and actually try and truly understand the hierarchy, think about what a parenting relationship literally means, look at every constraint, deleting and re-applying them, nothing worked or made sense. Finally realized I had "Snap to Increment" turned on. Fml
Managed to get this far and the rig is looking great. Just in case you read these and take feedback considerations for future content. The videos and information is great. The music is obnoxious. It's bad music in general but it really doesn't help that it's constantly jumping in volume. Please consider removing it altogether for tutorials. Watching these at 2x speed to get through the bulk of information and then needing the rewatch the more technical parts a few times is actually making me anxious with that beat constantly fading in and out. I think you generally have two types of people. Some who like background noise to work. They'll put their own music on. And those who like silence to focus. They can't remove your music. So in general it doesn't help anyone.
I know that I'm late to the party but awesome tutorial. A question, when you say that the leg IK has no strecthing what do you mean, you mean doing something with bendy bones like in the spine or is a completely different setup?
Amazing breakdown, just one doubt : What is the purpose of ctrl_IK_toe and MCH_IK_toe. You didn't apply IK constraint to them so i don't understand the choice of naming convention. May be a noob question.
Does your curve look vertical in the Drivers Editor? Try to hold down [Control] then also hold down the middle mouse button and scroll horizontally to adjust the scale. It took me like 20 mins to figure this out. Maybe that info helps someone else.
Thank you for the tutorial. The only thing I did different was make the main foot controller be the parent of the poles. (they move too much when they are parented to the shinbone.) I may regret this later when animating but will worry about that later.
Any idea why moving the IK stuff (shin,foot,toes) distorts my other pose bones CTRLs (specifically the widgets. If i remove the custom shape the bone is not distorting), but the distortion is only at the custom shapes, not on the mesh or bones.
Excelente video! Thanks for all the effort!!, but please @Dikko do an advance hip rigging tutorial!! Is driving me crazy and there’s not a single video (at least with the newest blender versions) of how to do it properly!! Open squads and side kicks seems imposible to me atm lol
Well may be I’m not :P haha, that said where I have most trouble is the the the deformation between the hip and the glute area, I can’t find a good way to preserve volume there when the the leg goes up sideways, (I’m trying to bend the hip to de side along the body), crotch area streatch weirdly, gluts got serious deep folds, I’ve try retopo differently, more loops less loops, more square topo, trying to learn better shape key implementation, maybe that solves it. Anyways thanks a lot for the quick response!
Hello budy! I saw these videos and are great, but I don't know if you already explained this and I didn't notice, but I need to ask if bones controlled by drivers can be exported normally to use in unity
No, it doesn’t work that way. Basically the way it works is that you bake the animation before u export to unity. All the animation gets transferred to the deform rig, and all the extra bones and drivers are no longer needed.
@@Dikko I get that, but what happens when I want to work with interactive characters like vtubers? they are not animated so baking animation doesn't seem like a solution in this case, at least to me. Is there a way to re enable the drivers inside of unity to fix things like the wrist or make better deforms?
Question: Since rigging is essentially computer programming, could a character be designed who calculates sequential prime numbers, fidgeting at a desk with a fake pencil, forever? Maybe even write the next one, then erase it for repeating the process? But without custom python code. I suppose you'd need a "case" statement. I haven't noticed any so far. Case = If x, then a. If x+1, then b. If x+2, then c. And you'd need an array ability you can index to enable objects to be visible.
@@Dikko I tested that chatgtp programming ability myself. I said make a red ball pop up on the screen in windows 10, 3 inches in diameter, then wait 3 seconds and make it change to blue. The darn thing did it in 10 seconds! And it worked exactly as requested. I suspect us humans are not needed much longer... Better finish our animations.
Thank you very much. very useful tut. I watched several foot rig tutorials and I'm curious if it's possible to attach heel rotation bone functionality to a foot location bone? Wouldn't it be more flexible? You can move your IK foot with it and than with same controller rotate the heel. is it possible to achieve this and can you tell me why everyone make this two controllers separate? I'm still new to all of this. )) thanks again.
Not sure what you mean? But I can Guess that the texture is mapped as 'generated' or 'object' which means it won't adhere to deformations of the mesh but rather the cage size of the object overall. Map your procedural textures to the uvs of your objects and that should solve the issue.
I'm having an issue :< When switching from IK (FK>IK = 1) back to FK (FK>IK = 0), it looks like the back half of the foot mesh stays wherever I left the IK controller instead of moving with the rest of the leg/foot back to the FK position. Specifically it appears to stick to MCH-IK-Shin. 002. Is this a constraint, driver, or parenting issue? My hierarchy matches the outline shown at the 8-10min mark
![[#3] Foot rigging in Blender using IK constraints](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/aAE_Az_51sk/mqdefault.jpg)
Love this video? Then check out my latest short film BLACK CURTAIN: The Fear. Out now! BLACK CURTAIN: The Fear
ua-cam.com/video/Hl8EpIU3iRI/v-deo.html
I feel like a damn wizard watching your vids
I was struggling to get the knee pole bone to follow along with the knee in a way that worked for me as I kept getting a lot of twisting in the shin and every solution I found online worked well with basic IK legs but not really with this amazing foot rig. I eventually came up with a pretty simple solution that so far seems to work quite well. I duplicated my MCH_IK_thigh bone so it is parented to the hip but not controlled by the IK chain, and then just put a damped track to aim it at the MCH_IK_shin.002, (the little ankle bones popping out the back that we used for the IK target) and used that as the parent for my pole vectors. It seems that the pole vectors follow the knee very nicely and don't add twist to my shins.
Thanks for the amazing tutorials, I never would have been able to rig characters without this series!
You are making this knowledge free. I am impressed and very thankfull
It's my pleasure
If you don't like tweaking driver curves, you can just make it "max(0, var)" and "max(0, -var)" and it does the same thing.
Never knew that trick. Nice!
@@Dikko You've taught me over 9000 tricks, so I guess we're even? Oh, BTW, "var" is almost certainly short for "variable," not "variance." Maybe I teach you two tricks.
My curve wasn't same as Dikko's (idk what went wrong haha) but you method solved the issue right away. thanks. I assume using min can do quite opposite?
This saved me a ton of time. Also, copying the drivers from left to right and just changing the name of the driving bone made rigging both feet a breeze.
Wow, thank you.
Never knew what's this graph for drivers was. But now I know it. Thanks
Really appreciate all the hard work and information in your tutorials. You deserve more. Thanks so much dude
Thanks for watching and for your support with a super!
'Im trying to an keep it all on X '... movie-star mode ... epic. , you are a great teacher
another kick-ass walkthrough form a kick-ass dude!
Thanks mate :)
Again waiting impatiently for the face rig for the master of masters DIKKO!!!
soon!
I just want to say, I tried using rigify to do my model, and it was okay. But now that I'm seven videos in these tutorials, making my own rig, I understand how it all works, and my rig works better than the rigify one did, even my weights are working better after watching your videos on that.
It just works, and that's so freaking cool
It's worth noting that you can copy constraints between bones. This is available under Pose > Constraints > Copy Constraints to Selected Bones
Select the target bones first. Then select the bone with the constraints you need duplicated.
thank you for mentioning this :DDDD
The last one! Oh, finally! What a trip!
Amazing, your work not only makes the whole process very clear, but also inspires to get to it, do the rig and make it work! Is fun and inspiring. Thanks a million !!!
You're a bloody legend.
Really appreciate you sharing this info man, Thank you.
Thanks! I just done rigging my caracter arms with yours previous tutorial
Oh awesome, the timing is good then :D
THE BEST TUTORIAL EVER THANKKYOUU!!! iI LEARN SO MUCH BIG BIG THANKS
I had to watch this a few times to understand what is going on lol. I had done this kind of rig on one of my characters, but I completely forgot how to do it on another character i'm working on. Super helpful though, and it's an awesome rig too! Thanks for showing us how to do this! :)
Hey dikko, i'm having a problem with the foot heel driver. When i add it to the bone, the function i get is a straight vertical line, and when i convert the bottom handle to free type and manipulate it the way you did, all i get is the inverse result, where i can rotate towards the front, but not backwards. I really don't know where i messed up :/
EDIT: I was able to make it work. First i changed the MCH_IK_footHeelRot.L.001 roll in 180° ( Yours might be different) and then binded the foot heel controller to the driver. With this, I was able to change the function in the graph without changing the rotation of the controller (which was another problem that I was having, where the rotation of the controller was following the function bottom handle). Took me a little bit of time to figured it out, but I still don't know why the function i'm getting when i add the driver is pretty much vertical, while the one that dikko gets is diagonal :)
EDIT2: The problem with the vertical function was just me and my dumb self not looking at the scale of the driver axis, when i zoomed enough in both axis, i was able to see that the function was correct ^^
Thanks, dude. Lots and lots of Infos and so good explained that the Brain can cope with all that drivers and parenting stuff.so good to see it working at the end. Triple Cheers to you
At the beginning I had the problem that my bone rotation was off and changing only the def bone rotation completely destroyed the mesh. First I thought I had to maybe unparent the Armature from the Mesh. But (in hindsight obviously) I just had to select the def and CTRL (IK & FK) bones and change their rotation at the same time. Probably obvious to the most, but maybe this helps someone :D Anyways, great tutorial as always Dikko! I fee like I'm getting a better understanding for rigging in general with each video. Thank you!
Thanks, this has helped me!
@@aronbijl4109 Awesome! Happy to hear that! :)
Good work, and good tutorial! Worked for me on my end.
After building this pretty complicated foot rig, I spent, like, 6 hours trying to figure out what finally broke my rig. I could rotate everything, but I literally couldn't move anything in terms of translating the location of any bone. I had to go back and actually try and truly understand the hierarchy, think about what a parenting relationship literally means, look at every constraint, deleting and re-applying them, nothing worked or made sense.
Finally realized I had "Snap to Increment" turned on. Fml
NOOOO
that sucks so much
the pain...
Get better soon
Managed to get this far and the rig is looking great. Just in case you read these and take feedback considerations for future content. The videos and information is great. The music is obnoxious. It's bad music in general but it really doesn't help that it's constantly jumping in volume. Please consider removing it altogether for tutorials. Watching these at 2x speed to get through the bulk of information and then needing the rewatch the more technical parts a few times is actually making me anxious with that beat constantly fading in and out.
I think you generally have two types of people. Some who like background noise to work. They'll put their own music on. And those who like silence to focus. They can't remove your music. So in general it doesn't help anyone.
I know that I'm late to the party but awesome tutorial. A question, when you say that the leg IK has no strecthing what do you mean, you mean doing something with bendy bones like in the spine or is a completely different setup?
Thanks Dikko! Fantastic Tutorial!
Amazing breakdown, just one doubt : What is the purpose of ctrl_IK_toe and MCH_IK_toe. You didn't apply IK constraint to them so i don't understand the choice of naming convention.
May be a noob question.
Does your curve look vertical in the Drivers Editor? Try to hold down [Control] then also hold down the middle mouse button and scroll horizontally to adjust the scale. It took me like 20 mins to figure this out. Maybe that info helps someone else.
Thank you ^
Great rigging tutorial!!!
Thank you! Cheers!
Yeeee boiii!
Thank you for the tutorial. The only thing I did different was make the main foot controller be the parent of the poles. (they move too much when they are parented to the shinbone.) I may regret this later when animating but will worry about that later.
Your tutorials are always awesome thx. By the way please what is the music on the background at 6:06 ?
Cool stuff as always!
Thanks again!
to me, your content is like land to a shipwrecked sailor...
Any idea why moving the IK stuff (shin,foot,toes) distorts my other pose bones CTRLs (specifically the widgets. If i remove the custom shape the bone is not distorting), but the distortion is only at the custom shapes, not on the mesh or bones.
Awesome!
Thanks!
Excelente video! Thanks for all the effort!!, but please @Dikko do an advance hip rigging tutorial!! Is driving me crazy and there’s not a single video (at least with the newest blender versions) of how to do it properly!! Open squads and side kicks seems imposible to me atm lol
There's not much else to a hip rig I must say - are you sure you're posing the kicks correctly?
Well may be I’m not :P haha, that said where I have most trouble is the the the deformation between the hip and the glute area, I can’t find a good way to preserve volume there when the the leg goes up sideways, (I’m trying to bend the hip to de side along the body), crotch area streatch weirdly, gluts got serious deep folds, I’ve try retopo differently, more loops less loops, more square topo, trying to learn better shape key implementation, maybe that solves it. Anyways thanks a lot for the quick response!
I got a special problem. Any idea how I could make a driver to change the plantigrade legs rig to a digitigrade rig?
Hello budy! I saw these videos and are great, but I don't know if you already explained this and I didn't notice, but I need to ask if bones controlled by drivers can be exported normally to use in unity
No, it doesn’t work that way. Basically the way it works is that you bake the animation before u export to unity. All the animation gets transferred to the deform rig, and all the extra bones and drivers are no longer needed.
@@Dikko I get that, but what happens when I want to work with interactive characters like vtubers? they are not animated so baking animation doesn't seem like a solution in this case, at least to me. Is there a way to re enable the drivers inside of unity to fix things like the wrist or make better deforms?
@@choysadraws you have to build the tracking system within unity itself, or use a plugin within unity that links to the deform rig
@@Dikko where can I find documentation to do that?
Question: Since rigging is essentially computer programming, could a character be designed who calculates sequential prime numbers, fidgeting at a desk with a fake pencil, forever? Maybe even write the next one, then erase it for repeating the process? But without custom python code. I suppose you'd need a "case" statement. I haven't noticed any so far. Case = If x, then a. If x+1, then b. If x+2, then c. And you'd need an array ability you can index to enable objects to be visible.
Anythings possible? Hell you can probably attempt to get Chat GPT to write a script for you to do it haha
@@Dikko I tested that chatgtp programming ability myself. I said make a red ball pop up on the screen in windows 10, 3 inches in diameter, then wait 3 seconds and make it change to blue. The darn thing did it in 10 seconds! And it worked exactly as requested. I suspect us humans are not needed much longer... Better finish our animations.
What are you planning to do after this rigging series???
Animation (walking, runs, action, acting) and other modeling techniques :)
Thank you very much. very useful tut.
I watched several foot rig tutorials and I'm curious if it's possible to attach heel rotation bone functionality to a foot location bone? Wouldn't it be more flexible? You can move your IK foot with it and than with same controller rotate the heel.
is it possible to achieve this and can you tell me why everyone make this two controllers separate?
I'm still new to all of this. ))
thanks again.
You can do that - whatever you like tbh. I prefer seperating the heel from the foot control because when I animate, it avoids doubling up of rotation.
Thank you for the tutorial. Can i ask you ? Why the rig deformed a procedural texture? How fix it?
Not sure what you mean? But I can Guess that the texture is mapped as 'generated' or 'object' which means it won't adhere to deformations of the mesh but rather the cage size of the object overall. Map your procedural textures to the uvs of your objects and that should solve the issue.
@@Dikko Yes. Texture Coordinate- Object. Thank you so much. I try UV. UV- worked! Thank you !!!!
I'm having an issue :< When switching from IK (FK>IK = 1) back to FK (FK>IK = 0), it looks like the back half of the foot mesh stays wherever I left the IK controller instead of moving with the rest of the leg/foot back to the FK position. Specifically it appears to stick to MCH-IK-Shin. 002. Is this a constraint, driver, or parenting issue? My hierarchy matches the outline shown at the 8-10min mark
How would you do IK rigging for a Digitigrade leg?
same thing, just extend the heel/ankle joints.
@@Dikko OK, Took what you said and made this, did i Do things right?
pbs.twimg.com/media/E1Ust-PXsAA26DM?format=png&name=small
Why don't you use copy rotation constraints instead of drivers?
I need you to create a discord so I could speak with you or other animators because I'm confused as hell about my short film right now
My Driver graph looks different? Still worked tho
Probs cos your joint orientation is opposite to mine. But if it works, it works :D
Now I know how to KICK Ass.
hi i have a truble and i can't fix please help me the bones that i created from this video does not swithc from ik to Fk pleas help me DIKKO
when you upload face rig ?
Hey man do you have a paypal or kofi we can donate to for making this series??
Not yet, but its on the cards :)
1 for simple ik foot ???
:D
Actually second 😀
Dikko, you're lovely, but please for sanity sake, turn off music autoduck! Good gracious, the sound goes wild when you're not speaking.
in 2023 any video beyond 15 mins will probably not have music in it -- too much effort for not much benefit.
@@Dikko ahaha I didn't mean for you to go that far, but I get it. Your voice is enough to keep me listening with the most attention :3
@@sol_mental haha no I get you. Tweaking the auto ducking to be just right tho can be a real bitch :p
actually first