Rigging and Animating a Magica Voxel Character [Blender Tutorial]

[@Polysthetic]

📻 Addendum: Of course, the example model I have is not ideal for rigging. You'll want to T-pose your models.

[@dominicc8264]

fantastic tutorial, showed me in depth every step

[@MangoVoxel]

I'm happy to see more voxel content creators making great videos for the community, thank you! ❤

[@Moonajuana]

Importing a model, cleaning vertices and touching on retopo, 2 methods for rigging, weight painting, animating mouth, eyes, walk/run cycle, all under 30 minutes. This is such a great video, thank you!

[@Polysthetic]

Thank you so much :)

[@pixel__lord]

please make a complete series of this

[@Polysthetic]

Thanks :) what would you like to see?

[@pixel__lord]

@@Polysthetic attack and death animations

[@DavidFoxIsAwesome]

do you have another vid elaborating on "cleaning up topology?" the part around ~6:52 when youre doing some kind of magic on the character's back--what is that? you described what you did--just not why? ;)

[@Polysthetic]

I don't have another video yet but topologyguides.com/ is a great resource for topology :) I noticed in that part of the video the previous topology on the back wasn't visible. The reason I cleaned it up was, as you'll notice in other parts of the mesh, you have long, thin triangles that connect sides to corners. If you were to subdivide or animate these triangles, you'll get stiff and jagged mesh deformation. Recall that when models get rigged, the faces don't warp, they're always flat, so the bends occur at the edges. So, what I did was, select the geometry and pressed F to merge it all into one big polygon, then thought about how to cut up that polygon so that the faces are all quads and triangles. You want to do this in such a way as to minimise the number of triangles (prefer quads), make the quads and triangles as square as possible (avoid sharp angles and elongated faces), and avoid vertices with too many connecting faces. There are of course many ways to achieve this and it doesn't need to be perfect but that was how I divided the back. Note that this is to make animations and subdivisions look good. If the purpose is for stills, or if that part of the mesh is not animated and makes no difference in the end, I don't bother with cleaning-up topology. Hope this helps :)

[@roelthijssen2147]

Just curious. Why not import as .ply? Gives u model divided in blocks, just like magica. Nice tut anyways!

[@Polysthetic]

Just tried this out, wow! It's certainly viable, and perhaps more workable than OBJ. A couple of things: 1. No material export, but you can just unwrap the pixels as shown in the video and map them to a pixel colour palette. 2. The mesh still isn't quite optimised, but it is easier to melt down many equal-sized squares than it is poorly-optimised triangles. Thanks for the suggestion :)

[@roelthijssen2147]

@@Polysthetic exactly! That’s the workflow I like to use. 👍🏻

[@voxoking32]

HEY Dude fantastic tut , Please, when I try to merge by ditamce all the texture mess up do you know why ?

[@Polysthetic]

That's odd, is the merge distance too high? If you're not losing geometry, I'm thinking maybe you coloured adjacent faces that share vertices different colours such that when you merge the vertices together, the new vertex is stretched between the two colours?

[@RealAV]

Hey so I was having the same issue, still brand new to this. But I recolored my model from a blank pallet in magicavoxel, and then brought back to blender as a OBJ file, and it worked!