Break Ya Neck: Rigging With Bendy Bones
Jason Schleifer from Nimble Collective shows us how he rigged the Animal Fact chicken neck and body using Blender 3D’s new Bendy Bones rigging system and the best way to keep the bones from twisting and breaking.
In particular, Jason determined a quick and easy workflow to allow the bones to move and twist by keeping all the axis of the bones aligned. This means that instead of just slapping a B-Bones armature on a single bone, he has created a mini rig consisting of a head and tail with a Bendy Bone center. You can watch the video and read the step by step process.
i straight up love this. :D
Thanks Steve. We’re glad you liked it. =)
Great tutorial, simple and fast. But I still wonder why and how was the other two bones setup for the chicken’s neck.
Hi AntonioBuch,
For the other two bones, we have two answers covering the extra bones:
1. For the Bendy Bone inside the neck, there were two extra bones added (top and bottom and then shrunk down) to act as handles to anchor and/or move the separate ends of the bendy segment.
2. As for the two bones on the right and left side of the chicken neck in the image, they were put on the outside with drivers attached so the neck would squash “out” and retain the overall shape and volume we wanted for the “flesh” of the neck.
Hope this answered your questions and thanks for watching!
Thanks to you! ;)
Great! Love the animation on that chicken! Thanks for sharing this
WHAT IS THE KIDS SOFTWARE YOU ARE USING
Hi Gloria,
we’re using 3d animation software called Blender. It’s pretty powerful, and more and more studios are starting to check it out! :)
http://blender.org
Free and open source! woo!
Hey Jason, super fan of you since
AFR release
I’ve just came across your awesome blender talk now https://youtube.com/watch?v=9iEf_MSdg5w 05 years later which inspired a lot but unfortunately the link for this tutorial is down.. ☹️
I’d love to start learning blender and it would be lovely to see how did you do not only approached the chicken neck but also the detachable wings
Could you please help re-uploading a workable link to this video? Or maybe send us here one downloadable blender scene file so we might be able to dig it a bit more?
Thanks in advance.
Sincerely,
This looks super interessting but i can’t find a working link for this. is there any possibility to watch this tutorial again somewhere?
They deleted their website and video. The video itself was in their Vimeo profile which is now empty. Shame, because it was a great quick tutorial.
You can find a very similar tutorial by Danny Mac 3D on YouTube, titled “BENDY BONES – Blender 2.8 Tutorial”, of 3m16s length. Explains the same as Nimble’s did.