The virgin "I blame Blender, the exporter, the game engine" The chad "I blame myself for having a smooth brain and not finding the CGDive tutorials sooner"
You can actually rename the animation inside Godot instead of re-exporting it again, Rename, hit the loop button and it works. Thanks for this great and very complete tutorial!
Dude, you not just teached how to export a rigged character to Godot, you actually teached how to also make a character controller and assign the animations to it! This is extremely awesome, and I was in need of this tutorial! I have just one questions: have you tried exporting the rigged character with also some shapekeys assigned to it?
@@CGDive Oh, I see, no problem though! I also have another question: does the preserve volume from the armature gets exported to a game engine? If not, do you know a workaround for this issue?
@@CrtngSomethings I don't think so. What you can do: -work more on your weight painting (can improve things but don't expect any miracles) -add more bones in the problem areas (difficult but you can achieve almost any deformation that way) -ask Godot devs if they have implemented or will implement "Dual Quaternion Skinning" in Godot (this is the tech that Preserve Volume uses)
I've been tinkering with blender and making some fairly complex 3d games using only C++ and OpenGL on pc and Java + Android SDK and OpenGL ES for android devices. I've made my own model loaders and skeletal animation controllers from scratch for both Collada and GLTF. I'm just a hobbyist but a fairly heavy one. I've been at it for years. I've watched and read tons of tutorials and documentation. The tutorials on this channel are by far the best I've ever seen! I can't believe how much I have learned about Blender, NLA, Rigify, and now you've restored my faith in game engines too! Thank you CG Dive !!!!!!!!!
51:25 You can see the exact needed string on mouse-over at the right. Just click on and hover you mouse on "Blend Position". Would be 100% better if we could drag and drop the field into the editor to get the correct string, but it's better than guessing.
I have explained this in a thread in a comment, but for making loop animations to work, you need to make the animation to be imported as separated files (.anim or .tres). That is achieved in the Godot's import tab in the gltf object. There is an option there to do so, and then the animation files created by reimporting the asset will have a loop checkbox to mark as loopable. This is how I was doing it until now, but the prefix is also a great trick!
Thanks for the info. I think this approach didn't work, at least in earlier versions of Godot. If it does now, then that's a great alternative to the prefix trick.
You cannot save the loop setting because it is inherited scene from glb that is read only. You can use "open anyway" to open the glb then save to tres, this create a copy that is editable. Create another scene and link the copied scene, set the node as editable children, then you can modify and save any settings. If you make some change to the glb, open it and overwrite the tres, the instanced scene will auto updated and overridden data is kept.
I really need to comment more, and thank you for sharing your knowledge. I just keep getting overwhelmed and just end up closing the browser window xD, but I really do appreciate what you do. So thank you, I have learned a lot.
Hey, thank you so much for this, I was dreading the export process so badly, and even when I saw the video was an hour long, I figured it would be a nightmare. But the actual export part of the video is only 10 minutes and it's super simple, so thank you again for this, you're amazing. I should report though that for the second model I baked animations on, the legs came out super messed up. I found out that reparenting the foot to the leg bone after generating the gameRig was causing this issue. Which is weird, because when I did as you showed in the video, and reparented all of the bones(after generating the gameRig) with my first model, it worked perfectly.
@@CGDive Yeah, I checked it again, and it seems that reparent the broken connections causes the baking to go insane. Which, again, is weird because it didn't turn out like that with the first model. Regardless, everything works out perfectly in the end.
@@CGDive I was using with offset, but now I can't reproduce it. I honestly think it had to do with selecting only the control bones when inserting keyframes, because if I don't select all of the bones when inserting keyframes, that specific animation can get messed up. I did have one more question though.. Do you know what could cause a specific bone to import with the wrong rotation on certain animations; i.e. the animation works perfectly in blender after the 'Bake Action Bakery', but is messed up in Godot? On certain animations, my character's hand positions would get messed up, causing them to clip through whatever they were holding. After comparing broken vs working animations, I'm pretty positive it's the Spine0 bone I added to my rig that, when imported and only with certain animations, seems to rotate an extra amount causing the shoulder/hand position to be off. Do you have any idea how to fix this? I'm considering just making a new rig to see if the problem persists.
@@connorhagerty537 Hi. I can't say for certain, especially since you mentioned a custom bone. If you use FBX, the Simplify export option often causes inconsistencies in the exported animation. Not sure if gltf has anything like it.
when you mention there is no easy way for the animations to loop. you can set in the import settings under Animations the Storage from "Built-In" to "Files (.anim)" and then the animation will loop. i don't really know what this also changes but everything else worked fine so far in our project.
I'm working on a character in blender 2.9, The GameRigTool works great. I tried opening the file in blender 3.1 with the beta GameRigTool plugin. Definitly needs some work all around lol Blender didn't like my rigify setup either. I'm sure with some tweaking I could get everything to work in blender 3.1, but I think ill just stick with my current 2.9 setup. Your content is extremely helpful, hope to see more updates soon! I would happily pay for the plugin again once I'm ready to move to newer versions of blender
What needs work? We haven't received any issue reports so we're not fixing anything at the moment. If you experience problems please let us know! Moving Rigs from 2.9 to 3+ should work (but not the other way around).
@@CGDive I tried to open a blender 2.9 file in blender 3.1 I installed the 3.1 GameRigTool and simply opened the 2.9 file in blender 3.1 I noticed the rotation of the game rig bones were incorrect. I deleted the game rig and tried to generate a new one from the control rig. The GameRigTool gave an error and instead of only generating deform bones, the tool essentially copied the entire control rig. It seems like the error just stopped or paused the code too early or something Attempting to put my control rig in "pose position" causes a lot of problems too, even if I had a muted game rig. I didn't spend much time playing with the file. I have a very strange custom rigify setup too. I built it from scratch. If I wanted to try and fix anything in that file, I'd probably start from the meta rig and go from there.
@@Stickman550 That sounds bad haha Could you share your file with us? (for troubleshooting and bug fixes only.) If possible, get in touch on Discord or via email cgdive.com/contact
@@CGDive So after I posted my previous comment, I curiously tried to reopen my blender file and it is totally working now. I have no idea what happened, but I simply opened blender 3.1 and dragged and dropped my 2.9 file in. 100% normal. The game rig was in tact, no strange deformed mesh or anything. Everything looks great. I noticed the GameRigTool pluggin was nowhere to be found. I simply reinstalled the plugin. I even deleted my game rig and generated a new one. 110% functionality. No errors or strange deformations. All the animations and NLA stuff is there too. Maybe something happened when I opened a new version of blender for the first time or something? I have no idea what happened, but everything fine now. I guess I'm just that bad at using blender lol As of now, there seems to be zero problems what so ever. If anything else happens I'll be sure to reach out and send an email or something, but to be honest I don't think you'll be hearing from me anytime soon ;) Absolutely love your content, keep it real
29:08 - Don't worry about this method, it's already very helpful to know we need to name our actions-loop on the NLA. Great find! How did you find out about this?
@@joshmbrown42 Yeah, sure the Godot manual is great. But not everyone reads it, especially not the whole thing. :D So I think it's nice to have it in a video tutorial. Aaaaaand ... just because it's explained in the Manual doesn't make the current implementation great. An easy way to turn looping on/off in engine is a must IMHO.
@@CGDive there is a button to turn looping on and off, its the small button with two arrows circling each other (top right of the animation tab) you can see it in 25:30
@@CGDive another way is to make the animation to be imported as separated files (.anim or .tres). That is achieved in the import tab in the gltf object. There is an option there to do so, and then the animation files will have a loop checkbox to mark as loopable. This is how I was doing it until now, but the prefix is also a great trick!
Does anyone else also have trouble activating the OneShot node? The "On" Button is deactivated (not clickable) for me. Not sure why. I am using Godot 4. And great video as always! You are very thorough with all you explanations :) Edit: Okay, instead of "action" I tried "request" and that seems to do the trick.
rly like this solution and the plugin good job ! but i do prefer after constraining the bones with those 2 armatures change the names in one of them (replase the DEF to bone_ in the game rig change the bone layers ect) and marge the game rig to the control rig just to avoid the rebaking everytime you change something in the animation and haing 2x more animations for eath armature, just makes it more clean in think. Heh when i was trying to use rigify as a game rig at first i was so confused wtf is going on there XD
The AnimationTree doesn't work for me. I have my animations, they play just fine in the player, I set up the graph in the Tree (adding the points at 0 and 5, where 5 was my max velocity length), but changing the Blend Position preview doesn't work, and it doesn't work when I test the game either. Edit: Okay, I had a couple of issues. First is that I was using a StateMachine node instead of a BlendSpace1D, so I switched that. But then I had another problem where the walk animation wouldn't play no matter what. Turns out, you do NOT want to tick that "Autoplay on load" button!! Don't click it! Don't set Idle as "default" animation because for some reason it will be utterly incapable of ever switching out of it. Once I unticked that, my walk animation played successfully.
Ha, yeah. The info is condensed so it will take more time the first time you do it. But when you know what you're doing, you'll be able to do it in 20 minutes or so :)
can shape keys export from blender to godot?????? really wish u could make a small tut on this1 i have came to know about unity3d and unreal engine on how to export models,rigs and animation but in godot i m not experience yet i have a very complex model and a rig where it has shape keys on it the thing right now what is stopping me is (can shape keys works on rig which has drivers on it if i export it in godot ????)
This is awesome. A quick design question - why did you choose to generate a game rig with 2 bones in the forearm, 2 bones in the upper arm, etc? I have been having some trouble with FABRIK, as it wants to bend the limbs at those "joints." Thanks!
The split bones in each limb part are called "twist bones" and they help produce better deformations, especially when the arm or hand "twists" :) It's a very common technique.
If my character has Inverse Kinematics there is a jitter for some reason. I have a robot(has only head and IK legs) that when I make it squat(I lower the head to make it squat) the legs are not stable they are moving around a little(probably the whole body moves but I can see it at the legs). When I lift the legs up the animation is perfect though. ( and of course in blender animation is perfect too)
Do you follow my workflow? If the animation is perfect in Blender, it means something happens on export or import. If it was the FBX exporter, it has some settings that can affect the exported animation (Simplify in particular). Not sure if glb has anything like that. And if it is Godot that causes the problem, then I have no idea. Also, someone on our discord had a problem with jittering feet and they found out that changing the IK solver was the solution. (Armature tab > Inverse Kinematics > IK solver: iTaSC )
@@CGDive Thank you for the reply! I made a new project from the beginning and Rigify works great, so something probably was wrong in the Armature that I made myself or in the IK but now all good. Only thing is that the project with the problem had "solid parts"(robot), the project that works fine has Automatic Weights. Soon I will try again without Automatic Weights to see if the issue was with the "solid parts".
@@CGDive haha thank you! I was going to try it last weekend but instead I tried MakeHuman mesh+armature, I just put IK and it worked great!(in Godot). So hopefully I will try the "solid parts style" next weekend.
the issue I'm having is that I have more than one character in the blend file. but when I export 1 character the skeleton of the other character is attached to the export file even when I dont select it
Trying to blend a walk and a run animation, my guy always looks weird when the blend is half-way between walk and run, like he's stumbling. Any ideas why?
Every time when I try to get my head around how to rig and animate I see tons of tutorials with different ways... but they are either not simple, outdated or are not doing the complete job, so you still have to know the drill and check everything and still have a lot to do, or if a tool is advertised to make it all for you, it does it not flawlessly, or it is not for free. It demotivates me every time. Unfortunately I can not keep up anymore, so that tutorials do not even give me hope anymore to find a solution for me -.- Why are Blender and Engine Developer not working on a common and simple solution? Why does no in-house solution exist in any of those engines to make Bones, Rigs and whatnot? Why do we have to rely on tools or a free 3d software that seems to have been never designed for game assets in mind?
Hey, I'm having a little trouble here, I exported the game rig and my 2 meshes and everything worked just fine on the viewport, including the animations, but I'm using this tutorial on a ViewModel rig, so the model has to be a child of the camera, and blender imported scenes can't have their paths changed on godot, so I copied the skeleton3d, my 2 meshes, the animation player and pasted to the player scene. When running the project the model follows the camera just right but when I press the button that plays a little animation just for testing I get these 2 errors on the output for each bone of my armature: E 0:00:02:0932 get_node: Node not found: "Armature_deform/Skeleton3D:Bone.002" (relative to "/root/world/player/CharacterBody3D/neck/Camera3D/Armature_deform/Skeleton3D"). Method/function failed. Returning: nullptr scene/main/node.cpp:1620 @ get_node() -- E 0:00:01:0356 _ensure_node_caches: On Animation: 'fire', couldn't resolve track: 'Armature_deform/Skeleton3D:Bone.002'. Condition "!child" is true. Continuing. scene/animation/animation_player.cpp:294 @ _ensure_node_caches() (The "Bone.002" part changes on each error to one of my armature bones) But I can see the bones of the copied skeleton in the node inspector, I am pretty sure they exist. I did not tried playing the animation with the player on the original scene, because even if it worked I wouldn't be able to make it child of the camera. Is playing the animation with the player on the original imported scene and then making the ViewModel follow the camera by script with an offset the only solution? Because I don't know how to do it and I think it would be an unnecessary loop to keep running the entire gameplay. I appreciate your attitude of making the blender addon free, thank you for the tutorial and for the addon! Edit: Bruhhhh, for anyone doing the same as me: instead of copying the skeleton 3d and the animation player copy the game_rig 3d node (or whatever you named the game_rig armature in blender) and the animation player instead. I copied the skeleton and the anim player because I already had a 3d node on my camera for the view model, after getting this error I even renamed it to "Armature_deform" (the name I assigned to the game_rig armature), but having a 3d node with the blender game_rig armature name is not the same as copying and pasting it. (I found this solution like 3 minutes after posting this comment, lol)
for Godot 3.4.4 a lot of this isn't working... like the model floating or the floor dropping. Also the part where the camera pivot $camera_pivot.rotation_degrees.x isn't working either and personally I haven't a clue how to fix things like this
I don't work with Godot much so yeah, the info will slowly get outdated. My guess is that most things will work. You can ask at a Godot community to help you figure out the ones that no longer work as in the video.
That is unlikely since this is the first time I hear of JMonkeyEngine :) See my videos on game ready rigs. The principles work for any engine. ruclips.net/p/PLdcL5aF8ZcJvCyqWeCBYVGKbQgrQngen3
i have a question on how i would add a weapon to the character rig since in my blender file i use a "Child-of" constraint but since we can't use them in Godot i am clueless on how to add a weapon to my character. first time i tried to do it by just adding the bow rig to the character rig but this gave me horrible controlls for the weapon and also the longest error message i have ever seen but only after the second export. how would you do it?
There are two main approaches: one is to simply include the weapon as a part of your character. The other is to have them separate and join them through code in godot. For the second method, you should ask on a Godot community, they should give you a better answer. For the first one, you just have to include the weapon bones into the main character's armature. " first time i tried to do it by just adding the bow rig to the character rig but this gave me horrible controls" Did you just join two separate rigs? That could work but it could create problems too.
Is There a way to control (rotate, scale, transform) the bones from within Godot so that You don't need to make animations but can control the bones through GD script?
Do we have to export with Armature -> Skeleton -> Pose Position or in Rest Position? I noticed that when i export in Rest Position, animations don't work. They only work when exporting in Pose Position. At first i exported it in Rest Position because i thought the character should be exported in its neutral position. Could you explain why, I'm quiet new into this =)
Oh... When you place it in Rest Position blender "forces" the rig to stay in the neutral position. This can be used for troubleshooting or just to check what the Rest Pose looks like. But in this state animation cannot be played or exported. It depends on the exporter but generally, it will export the Rest Pose with the animations. GLTF will do that, I think. So, you don't have to worry about exporting the Rest Pose, it will happen on its own. For UE4/5 it's actually beneficial to export one FBX with the rest pose and no animation and separate FBX files which actually contain animation. You have to know the workflow for the engine you're using :)
Scaling generally "works"... the problem is that the hierarchy of the bones may make your stretchy character look different than in Blender. Watch these two videos for more info: ruclips.net/video/1Xm1h700uhk/видео.html ruclips.net/video/8PSj_1-E9uY/видео.html
I tried to export my character but I don't know how armature works in godot and how to make bones move. Trying to export using gltf made the mesh invisible so I had to use conda
Possible to rig character faces but not using "superface" ? and just using rigify bones? I've been following your videos and getting up too speed, getting better every day! I was going to attempt to rig my 1 eye'd Ogre, but superFace instantly breaks moment you delete anything. There is almost no tutorials of your quality about rigging faces.
Right, the superface is not so super if you need to edit it :D I have videos about rigging a custom face in my advanced Rigify course (Dragon chapters) gumroad.com/l/rigify
@@CGDive yes. one thing that might affect this is that some parts of the model are parented to bones rather than armature deform.. but I think that would mean that only the object with armature deform would move, rather than nothing being affected by the rig
Alright, it turns out everything's been actually working fine, I've just been testing the wrong animation - the unbaked one rather the baked one. Now playing back the correct animation in godot everything's moving as it should. Thanks for the help though :)
I have no dog in the race. It's one of the popular engines these days and I wanted to test and show my game-rig workflow in it. I enjoyed working with Godot, actually: easy to use, lots of cool tools, lightweight, stable, etc. Also, a lot of people want to work with FOSS so this is a great alternative to the big boys.
@@MeshVoid Blender is free and this day and age argueably better than maya. While ue4, unity are free too while offering alot more. Sure you have to pay at a certain point but for ue4 it's at 1million/year.
@@colascage1284 Do you know what FOSS is? Have you tried prototyping games from start to finish in all those three engines? I have. Yes, unreal is great and has a lot of flashing marketing videos flooding youtube made by clamping 3d-scanned assets with 4-8k photoreal textures together, sure looks great, sure great render engine a lot of big companies use it, best real-time render engine there is. It's not like you're saying something new that unreal is cool. But try making a game in Unreal solo. Even if you use blueprints only, its going to be way slower than Godot and Unity with their respective language support. And given the fact that Unity is pretty neat too, with it's C# capabilities, but it is completely close-sourced, also it's 2d physics engine paradoxically is worse than Godot's. Godot, on the other hand is a FOSS engine (Just like Blender, unlike Unreal and Unity). With completely open source code, absolutely no telemetry and respect for your privacy, written to have extremely small size as it's developers make sure it stays general purpose engine and not get bloated with external poorly-integrated libraries like they do in Unreal or Unity. It has cross platform support for publishing, runs well on any OS. Even latest Godot 3.3 version is already pretty cool with it's updates to physics engine. It's even faster to make games with Godot than Unity with it's script language GDScript, there's also support for C# and C++ and also loads more language support created by the community (neither Unity or Unreal offers this type of flexibility). It's being developed by a core team and community contributors from all around the world (Just like Blender, unlike Unreal and Unity). That's why comparing it with Unreal and saying Unreal is free too is not a valid point, both Unity and Unreal are not FOSS by any means, freeware is not Free and open source, there's a huge difference. So your claim is the same as saying, - why use blender under a Blender tutorial video. Consider Godot 3.3 as a Blender version 2.5, and upcoming Godot 4 version as Blender 2.79, and it will only get better and better with time, just like Blender did.
The virgin "I blame Blender, the exporter, the game engine"
The chad "I blame myself for having a smooth brain and not finding the CGDive tutorials sooner"
You can actually rename the animation inside Godot instead of re-exporting it again, Rename, hit the loop button and it works.
Thanks for this great and very complete tutorial!
Oh, I'll have to test that. You have to "unpack" the animations first right?
Back in 2019 Godot's loop animation button never worked right
Dude, you not just teached how to export a rigged character to Godot, you actually teached how to also make a character controller and assign the animations to it! This is extremely awesome, and I was in need of this tutorial!
I have just one questions: have you tried exporting the rigged character with also some shapekeys assigned to it?
I haven't tested that yet sorry. I have done some tests with FBX for other engines and it tends to work.
@@CGDive Oh, I see, no problem though!
I also have another question: does the preserve volume from the armature gets exported to a game engine? If not, do you know a workaround for this issue?
@@CrtngSomethings I don't think so. What you can do:
-work more on your weight painting (can improve things but don't expect any miracles)
-add more bones in the problem areas (difficult but you can achieve almost any deformation that way)
-ask Godot devs if they have implemented or will implement "Dual Quaternion Skinning" in Godot (this is the tech that Preserve Volume uses)
@@CGDive Also using corrective shape keys could be an option but likely both difficult and expensive.
I've been tinkering with blender and making some fairly complex 3d games using only C++ and OpenGL on pc and Java + Android SDK and OpenGL ES for android devices. I've made my own model loaders and skeletal animation controllers from scratch for both Collada and GLTF. I'm just a hobbyist but a fairly heavy one. I've been at it for years. I've watched and read tons of tutorials and documentation. The tutorials on this channel are by far the best I've ever seen! I can't believe how much I have learned about Blender, NLA, Rigify, and now you've restored my faith in game engines too! Thank you CG Dive !!!!!!!!!
Thank you, Samuel, for the positive words, and keep up the heavy hobbyist work! :)
I am glad the tuts are useful!
Yeesss this is gold! Full worklow ftw!
51:25 You can see the exact needed string on mouse-over at the right. Just click on and hover you mouse on "Blend Position". Would be 100% better if we could drag and drop the field into the editor to get the correct string, but it's better than guessing.
Thanks!
You can right click on the label of the field to get the string as well. No need to remember or write it down.
I have explained this in a thread in a comment, but for making loop animations to work, you need to make the animation to be imported as separated files (.anim or .tres). That is achieved in the Godot's import tab in the gltf object. There is an option there to do so, and then the animation files created by reimporting the asset will have a loop checkbox to mark as loopable. This is how I was doing it until now, but the prefix is also a great trick!
Thanks for the info. I think this approach didn't work, at least in earlier versions of Godot. If it does now, then that's a great alternative to the prefix trick.
It's ridiculous that it's so unintuitive. Looping should just work
You cannot save the loop setting because it is inherited scene from glb that is read only. You can use "open anyway" to open the glb then save to tres, this create a copy that is editable. Create another scene and link the copied scene, set the node as editable children, then you can modify and save any settings. If you make some change to the glb, open it and overwrite the tres, the instanced scene will auto updated and overridden data is kept.
Perfect!! so timely with .GLB format!
GLTF is the way :P
Amazing tutorials
Thank you sir :D
Thank you very much!
I really need to comment more, and thank you for sharing your knowledge. I just keep getting overwhelmed and just end up closing the browser window xD, but I really do appreciate what you do. So thank you, I have learned a lot.
Awesome video. Learnt a lot of new cool things :)
No wonder this video doesn't have any dislikes !!!
Godot can be quite nice with 3D.
Protip to those watching this: do try to use the GRT addon. Exporting without the addon's interception could result in nonfunctional animations.
Hey, thank you so much for this, I was dreading the export process so badly, and even when I saw the video was an hour long, I figured it would be a nightmare. But the actual export part of the video is only 10 minutes and it's super simple, so thank you again for this, you're amazing. I should report though that for the second model I baked animations on, the legs came out super messed up. I found out that reparenting the foot to the leg bone after generating the gameRig was causing this issue. Which is weird, because when I did as you showed in the video, and reparented all of the bones(after generating the gameRig) with my first model, it worked perfectly.
Yeah, that does sound strange.
Are you sure that the problem is parenting the foot in the game rig?
@@CGDive Yeah, I checked it again, and it seems that reparent the broken connections causes the baking to go insane. Which, again, is weird because it didn't turn out like that with the first model. Regardless, everything works out perfectly in the end.
@@connorhagerty537 oh... Did you parent with Connected? That could make things weird under certain circumstances.
@@CGDive I was using with offset, but now I can't reproduce it. I honestly think it had to do with selecting only the control bones when inserting keyframes, because if I don't select all of the bones when inserting keyframes, that specific animation can get messed up. I did have one more question though.. Do you know what could cause a specific bone to import with the wrong rotation on certain animations; i.e. the animation works perfectly in blender after the 'Bake Action Bakery', but is messed up in Godot? On certain animations, my character's hand positions would get messed up, causing them to clip through whatever they were holding. After comparing broken vs working animations, I'm pretty positive it's the Spine0 bone I added to my rig that, when imported and only with certain animations, seems to rotate an extra amount causing the shoulder/hand position to be off. Do you have any idea how to fix this? I'm considering just making a new rig to see if the problem persists.
@@connorhagerty537 Hi. I can't say for certain, especially since you mentioned a custom bone.
If you use FBX, the Simplify export option often causes inconsistencies in the exported animation. Not sure if gltf has anything like it.
Extremely thorough. Thank you!
Really informative video with no bs👍🏽
I usually never comment just for the sake of commenting, but god this was great
Thank you! And a positive comment is never lost. You can be sure that it will be appreciated :)
when you mention there is no easy way for the animations to loop. you can set in the import settings under Animations the Storage from "Built-In" to "Files (.anim)" and then the animation will loop. i don't really know what this also changes but everything else worked fine so far in our project.
Thanks!
Awesome tutorial, man! More Godot tutorials, please!
YAYYYY!!!! just what I needed it~ thank you
Amazing tutorial, thank you so much for this.
I'm working on a character in blender 2.9, The GameRigTool works great. I tried opening the file in blender 3.1 with the beta GameRigTool plugin. Definitly needs some work all around lol
Blender didn't like my rigify setup either. I'm sure with some tweaking I could get everything to work in blender 3.1, but I think ill just stick with my current 2.9 setup. Your content is extremely helpful, hope to see more updates soon! I would happily pay for the plugin again once I'm ready to move to newer versions of blender
What needs work? We haven't received any issue reports so we're not fixing anything at the moment. If you experience problems please let us know!
Moving Rigs from 2.9 to 3+ should work (but not the other way around).
@@CGDive I tried to open a blender 2.9 file in blender 3.1
I installed the 3.1 GameRigTool and simply opened the 2.9 file in blender 3.1
I noticed the rotation of the game rig bones were incorrect. I deleted the game rig and tried to generate a new one from the control rig. The GameRigTool gave an error and instead of only generating deform bones, the tool essentially copied the entire control rig. It seems like the error just stopped or paused the code too early or something
Attempting to put my control rig in "pose position" causes a lot of problems too, even if I had a muted game rig.
I didn't spend much time playing with the file. I have a very strange custom rigify setup too. I built it from scratch.
If I wanted to try and fix anything in that file, I'd probably start from the meta rig and go from there.
@@Stickman550 That sounds bad haha
Could you share your file with us? (for troubleshooting and bug fixes only.)
If possible, get in touch on Discord or via email
cgdive.com/contact
@@CGDive
So after I posted my previous comment, I curiously tried to reopen my blender file and it is totally working now. I have no idea what happened, but I simply opened blender 3.1 and dragged and dropped my 2.9 file in. 100% normal. The game rig was in tact, no strange deformed mesh or anything. Everything looks great.
I noticed the GameRigTool pluggin was nowhere to be found. I simply reinstalled the plugin. I even deleted my game rig and generated a new one. 110% functionality. No errors or strange deformations. All the animations and NLA stuff is there too. Maybe something happened when I opened a new version of blender for the first time or something? I have no idea what happened, but everything fine now.
I guess I'm just that bad at using blender lol
As of now, there seems to be zero problems what so ever. If anything else happens I'll be sure to reach out and send an email or something, but to be honest I don't think you'll be hearing from me anytime soon ;)
Absolutely love your content, keep it real
@@Stickman550 Great to know it works now!
Gonna keep it real! :D
Since the gltf module was backported from the main branch (4.0) to the 3.4 beta i wonder how much the import process changed.
29:08 - Don't worry about this method, it's already very helpful to know we need to name our actions-loop on the NLA. Great find! How did you find out about this?
@@joshmbrown42 Yeah, sure the Godot manual is great. But not everyone reads it, especially not the whole thing. :D So I think it's nice to have it in a video tutorial. Aaaaaand ... just because it's explained in the Manual doesn't make the current implementation great. An easy way to turn looping on/off in engine is a must IMHO.
@@CGDive + @joshmbrown42 thank you for sharing this.
@@CGDive there is a button to turn looping on and off, its the small button with two arrows circling each other (top right of the animation tab) you can see it in 25:30
@@2nafish117 Oh, that works only in the animation viewer. It doesn't affect looping when you play the game. I demonstrated that in the video :)
@@CGDive another way is to make the animation to be imported as separated files (.anim or .tres). That is achieved in the import tab in the gltf object. There is an option there to do so, and then the animation files will have a loop checkbox to mark as loopable. This is how I was doing it until now, but the prefix is also a great trick!
This channels is perfect! Keep it up!
Does anyone else also have trouble activating the OneShot node? The "On" Button is deactivated (not clickable) for me. Not sure why. I am using Godot 4.
And great video as always! You are very thorough with all you explanations :)
Edit: Okay, instead of "action" I tried "request" and that seems to do the trick.
Moving from 2d to 3d KEEP EM COMING! 🎉#at2dgames #thenigmartist
Yo, this is gold, good job 👍
rly like this solution and the plugin good job ! but i do prefer after constraining the bones with those 2 armatures change the names in one of them (replase the DEF to bone_ in the game rig change the bone layers ect) and marge the game rig to the control rig just to avoid the rebaking everytime you change something in the animation and haing 2x more animations for eath armature, just makes it more clean in think. Heh when i was trying to use rigify as a game rig at first i was so confused wtf is going on there XD
Yeah, I'll test merging the armatures and see what happens. It should work, I just don't want to test it well.
This video saved my career 🙏
Haha, what happened?
The AnimationTree doesn't work for me. I have my animations, they play just fine in the player, I set up the graph in the Tree (adding the points at 0 and 5, where 5 was my max velocity length), but changing the Blend Position preview doesn't work, and it doesn't work when I test the game either.
Edit: Okay, I had a couple of issues. First is that I was using a StateMachine node instead of a BlendSpace1D, so I switched that. But then I had another problem where the walk animation wouldn't play no matter what. Turns out, you do NOT want to tick that "Autoplay on load" button!! Don't click it! Don't set Idle as "default" animation because for some reason it will be utterly incapable of ever switching out of it. Once I unticked that, my walk animation played successfully.
Danke!
Danker fur der/die/das/den Tip! :P
(German grammar is an Alptraum :D)
Cool Tutorial, funny how it took me 6 hours and the video is 1 hour.
Ha, yeah. The info is condensed so it will take more time the first time you do it. But when you know what you're doing, you'll be able to do it in 20 minutes or so :)
@@CGDive Yea. now i figured it out haha.
can shape keys export from blender to godot??????
really wish u could make a small tut on this1 i have came to know about unity3d and unreal engine on how to export models,rigs and animation but in godot i m not experience yet i have a very complex model and a rig where it has shape keys on it the thing right now what is stopping me is (can shape keys works on rig which has drivers on it if i export it in godot ????)
It should be possible. I am not too focused on Godot so I would suggest asking on a Godot forum.
This is awesome. A quick design question - why did you choose to generate a game rig with 2 bones in the forearm, 2 bones in the upper arm, etc? I have been having some trouble with FABRIK, as it wants to bend the limbs at those "joints." Thanks!
The split bones in each limb part are called "twist bones" and they help produce better deformations, especially when the arm or hand "twists" :) It's a very common technique.
@@CGDive Thanks - then there's probably also a simple work around to make use of the IK stuff that I haven't figured out yet :D
Using Blender 3.0.0 and the GLTF exporter bug that includes all armatures appears to have been fixed somewhere between this video and that release.
Yes, there is a very active GLTF dev. A lot of things have been improved since.
If my character has Inverse Kinematics there is a jitter for some reason. I have a robot(has only head and IK legs) that when I make it squat(I lower the head to make it squat) the legs are not stable they are moving around a little(probably the whole body moves but I can see it at the legs). When I lift the legs up the animation is perfect though. ( and of course in blender animation is perfect too)
Do you follow my workflow?
If the animation is perfect in Blender, it means something happens on export or import. If it was the FBX exporter, it has some settings that can affect the exported animation (Simplify in particular). Not sure if glb has anything like that.
And if it is Godot that causes the problem, then I have no idea.
Also, someone on our discord had a problem with jittering feet and they found out that changing the IK solver was the solution. (Armature tab > Inverse Kinematics > IK solver: iTaSC )
@@CGDive Thank you for the reply! I made a new project from the beginning and Rigify works great, so something probably was wrong in the Armature that I made myself or in the IK but now all good. Only thing is that the project with the problem had "solid parts"(robot), the project that works fine has Automatic Weights. Soon I will try again without Automatic Weights to see if the issue was with the "solid parts".
@@an4ximander ok, let me know how it goes :)
@@CGDive haha thank you! I was going to try it last weekend but instead I tried MakeHuman mesh+armature, I just put IK and it worked great!(in Godot). So hopefully I will try the "solid parts style" next weekend.
36:50 so... it's basically true if function returns true, and false if function returns false... I see
the issue I'm having is that I have more than one character in the blend file. but when I export 1 character the skeleton of the other character is attached to the export file even when I dont select it
I am not sure how much the gltf exporter has been improved. You may have to split them into separate blend files.
Trying to blend a walk and a run animation, my guy always looks weird when the blend is half-way between walk and run, like he's stumbling. Any ideas why?
I have a video showing how to make animations
ruclips.net/video/jB9iBT6J47Y/видео.html
Every time when I try to get my head around how to rig and animate I see tons of tutorials with different ways... but they are either not simple, outdated or are not doing the complete job, so you still have to know the drill and check everything and still have a lot to do, or if a tool is advertised to make it all for you, it does it not flawlessly, or it is not for free.
It demotivates me every time. Unfortunately I can not keep up anymore, so that tutorials do not even give me hope anymore to find a solution for me -.-
Why are Blender and Engine Developer not working on a common and simple solution?
Why does no in-house solution exist in any of those engines to make Bones, Rigs and whatnot?
Why do we have to rely on tools or a free 3d software that seems to have been never designed for game assets in mind?
Not sure what to tell you but I hope you find the right tool for your goals :)
Hey, I'm having a little trouble here, I exported the game rig and my 2 meshes and everything worked just fine on the viewport, including the animations, but I'm using this tutorial on a ViewModel rig, so the model has to be a child of the camera, and blender imported scenes can't have their paths changed on godot, so I copied the skeleton3d, my 2 meshes, the animation player and pasted to the player scene.
When running the project the model follows the camera just right but when I press the button that plays a little animation just for testing I get these 2 errors on the output for each bone of my armature:
E 0:00:02:0932 get_node: Node not found: "Armature_deform/Skeleton3D:Bone.002" (relative to "/root/world/player/CharacterBody3D/neck/Camera3D/Armature_deform/Skeleton3D").
Method/function failed. Returning: nullptr
scene/main/node.cpp:1620 @ get_node()
--
E 0:00:01:0356 _ensure_node_caches: On Animation: 'fire', couldn't resolve track: 'Armature_deform/Skeleton3D:Bone.002'.
Condition "!child" is true. Continuing.
scene/animation/animation_player.cpp:294 @ _ensure_node_caches()
(The "Bone.002" part changes on each error to one of my armature bones)
But I can see the bones of the copied skeleton in the node inspector, I am pretty sure they exist. I did not tried playing the animation with the player on the original scene, because even if it worked I wouldn't be able to make it child of the camera. Is playing the animation with the player on the original imported scene and then making the ViewModel follow the camera by script with an offset the only solution? Because I don't know how to do it and I think it would be an unnecessary loop to keep running the entire gameplay.
I appreciate your attitude of making the blender addon free, thank you for the tutorial and for the addon!
Edit: Bruhhhh, for anyone doing the same as me: instead of copying the skeleton 3d and the animation player copy the game_rig 3d node (or whatever you named the game_rig armature in blender) and the animation player instead.
I copied the skeleton and the anim player because I already had a 3d node on my camera for the view model, after getting this error I even renamed it to "Armature_deform" (the name I assigned to the game_rig armature), but having a 3d node with the blender game_rig armature name is not the same as copying and pasting it.
(I found this solution like 3 minutes after posting this comment, lol)
Hope you find a solution. I am not using Godot actively so I can't help much.
for Godot 3.4.4 a lot of this isn't working... like the model floating or the floor dropping. Also the part where the camera pivot $camera_pivot.rotation_degrees.x isn't working either and personally I haven't a clue how to fix things like this
I don't work with Godot much so yeah, the info will slowly get outdated. My guess is that most things will work. You can ask at a Godot community to help you figure out the ones that no longer work as in the video.
May I request you to make a video on rigged character workflow for Blender to JMonkeyEngine 3, many thanks :)
That is unlikely since this is the first time I hear of JMonkeyEngine :)
See my videos on game ready rigs. The principles work for any engine.
ruclips.net/p/PLdcL5aF8ZcJvCyqWeCBYVGKbQgrQngen3
i have a question on how i would add a weapon to the character rig since in my blender file i use a "Child-of" constraint but since we can't use them in Godot i am clueless on how to add a weapon to my character. first time i tried to do it by just adding the bow rig to the character rig but this gave me horrible controlls for the weapon and also the longest error message i have ever seen but only after the second export. how would you do it?
There are two main approaches: one is to simply include the weapon as a part of your character. The other is to have them separate and join them through code in godot. For the second method, you should ask on a Godot community, they should give you a better answer.
For the first one, you just have to include the weapon bones into the main character's armature.
" first time i tried to do it by just adding the bow rig to the character rig but this gave me horrible controls"
Did you just join two separate rigs? That could work but it could create problems too.
Is There a way to control (rotate, scale, transform) the bones from within Godot so that You don't need to make animations but can control the bones through GD script?
I guess there is but I am not the right person to ask about that :)
I use C#. I get error when multiplying Transform.basis to vector3. Any idea?
Very helpful tutorial btw :)
Zero idea:) I'm not a coder. I can just figure out basic stuff when necessary.
I ran into the looping thing too back 2 years ago, its annoying. It should just work. Its stupid. I wrote gdscript to force looping.
Do we have to export with Armature -> Skeleton -> Pose Position or in Rest Position?
I noticed that when i export in Rest Position, animations don't work. They only work when exporting in Pose Position. At first i exported it in Rest Position because i thought the character should be exported in its neutral position. Could you explain why, I'm quiet new into this =)
Oh... When you place it in Rest Position blender "forces" the rig to stay in the neutral position. This can be used for troubleshooting or just to check what the Rest Pose looks like. But in this state animation cannot be played or exported.
It depends on the exporter but generally, it will export the Rest Pose with the animations. GLTF will do that, I think. So, you don't have to worry about exporting the Rest Pose, it will happen on its own.
For UE4/5 it's actually beneficial to export one FBX with the rest pose and no animation and separate FBX files which actually contain animation. You have to know the workflow for the engine you're using :)
@@CGDive Thanks for the clear explanation!
I get a error saying nonetype has no attribute joints
Not enough info, not sure 😊
51:55 afaik you can drap'n'drop path name to the editor
How? That would be great but I can't find a way to do it.
@UC9zxTLbcie13gfGI75_NhGQ YT spam detection is crazy. If you can share it on discord or something, that would cool!
discord.gg/YFH5HUv
can normally scalling bone work and export in game engine??
if yes can i add copy transform on game rig?? will it work
Scaling generally "works"... the problem is that the hierarchy of the bones may make your stretchy character look different than in Blender.
Watch these two videos for more info:
ruclips.net/video/1Xm1h700uhk/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/8PSj_1-E9uY/видео.html
@@CGDive Thank u for the video that help me alot
U R THE BEST
Looks like there is no code which actually excludes rigs. That use selection only checks for mesh objects as far as i could see in the code
Not sure what you are talking about :)
@@CGDive That part about why all the other rigs are exported even when you have "use selection" checked
@@RomboutVersluijs OH! Well, that makes sense. I wonder why ... it doesn't sound harder than excluding Mesh Objects.
Do you know if shape keys work in godot 4?
It should work although I haven't tested it.
Can you make a version of this tutorial for blender 2.79? I can't update my blender because of graphics drivers
No way, Jose! haha
Sorry to hear you can't update your drivers but the chances of going back to 2.7 are zero, sorry. :)
Does 2.7 even have GLTF?
@@CGDive yes, via a plugin
I tried to export my character but I don't know how armature works in godot and how to make bones move. Trying to export using gltf made the mesh invisible so I had to use conda
@@CGDive 2.79 actually
no gap
???
@@CGDive no gab
Possible to rig character faces but not using "superface" ? and just using rigify bones? I've been following your videos and getting up too speed, getting better every day! I was going to attempt to rig my 1 eye'd Ogre, but superFace instantly breaks moment you delete anything. There is almost no tutorials of your quality about rigging faces.
Right, the superface is not so super if you need to edit it :D
I have videos about rigging a custom face in my advanced Rigify course (Dragon chapters)
gumroad.com/l/rigify
@@CGDive Nice one! Thanks for the fast reply, I'll get on it!
i like 29:32
thanks :)
I exported the scene and the whole armature works fine in godot, but the mesh doesn't deform at all :(
Does it deform in blender?
@@CGDive yes.
one thing that might affect this is that some parts of the model are parented to bones rather than armature deform.. but I think that would mean that only the object with armature deform would move, rather than nothing being affected by the rig
@@drakonicguy Oh! Parenting to bones is just a Blender feature. It can't be exported. Parent with weights and armature deform and export again :)
@@CGDive alright, I'll try that, thanks!
Alright, it turns out everything's been actually working fine, I've just been testing the wrong animation - the unbaked one rather the baked one. Now playing back the correct animation in godot everything's moving as it should. Thanks for the help though :)
FOUND IN BLENDER 2.80 NECESARY SI AND NO.
This is an epic comment. Unfortunately, I am not sure what it means :)
@@CGDive IN WHATS VERSION OF BLENDER FOUND.
@@re-dxealhgamemaker3070 I can't remember exactly. Probably 2.9 or so. GLTF was improved lately so the newer your Blender version, the better.
@@CGDive THANKS
why is this the only good workflow video
I don't know if it the only one but thanks for the nice words!
lmao why would you use that engine
I have no dog in the race. It's one of the popular engines these days and I wanted to test and show my game-rig workflow in it. I enjoyed working with Godot, actually: easy to use, lots of cool tools, lightweight, stable, etc. Also, a lot of people want to work with FOSS so this is a great alternative to the big boys.
The same as saying, lmao, why use blender.
@@MeshVoid Blender is free and this day and age argueably better than maya. While ue4, unity are free too while offering alot more. Sure you have to pay at a certain point but for ue4 it's at 1million/year.
@@colascage1284 Do you know what FOSS is? Have you tried prototyping games from start to finish in all those three engines? I have. Yes, unreal is great and has a lot of flashing marketing videos flooding youtube made by clamping 3d-scanned assets with 4-8k photoreal textures together, sure looks great, sure great render engine a lot of big companies use it, best real-time render engine there is. It's not like you're saying something new that unreal is cool. But try making a game in Unreal solo. Even if you use blueprints only, its going to be way slower than Godot and Unity with their respective language support. And given the fact that Unity is pretty neat too, with it's C# capabilities, but it is completely close-sourced, also it's 2d physics engine paradoxically is worse than Godot's. Godot, on the other hand is a FOSS engine (Just like Blender, unlike Unreal and Unity). With completely open source code, absolutely no telemetry and respect for your privacy, written to have extremely small size as it's developers make sure it stays general purpose engine and not get bloated with external poorly-integrated libraries like they do in Unreal or Unity. It has cross platform support for publishing, runs well on any OS. Even latest Godot 3.3 version is already pretty cool with it's updates to physics engine. It's even faster to make games with Godot than Unity with it's script language GDScript, there's also support for C# and C++ and also loads more language support created by the community (neither Unity or Unreal offers this type of flexibility). It's being developed by a core team and community contributors from all around the world (Just like Blender, unlike Unreal and Unity). That's why comparing it with Unreal and saying Unreal is free too is not a valid point, both Unity and Unreal are not FOSS by any means, freeware is not Free and open source, there's a huge difference. So your claim is the same as saying, - why use blender under a Blender tutorial video. Consider Godot 3.3 as a Blender version 2.5, and upcoming Godot 4 version as Blender 2.79, and it will only get better and better with time, just like Blender did.
@@MeshVoid That's some effort for resonding to some troll post. Didnt read btw.
Thank you so much!