Tutorial Lesson3 - Neck - Rigging Females with Blender

Complete Course Overview

There are a lot of things you see on a nude that you don’t see on a clothed model. From the scapula to the shoulder, the hips to the toes, there are a lot of concerns that traditional character rigging tutorial series skip. We will skip none of these.

When viewing a nude character, all of her joints, bends, and creases must be addressed. If we fail that, the nude will look low-quality and strange.

Improper treatment of these items lead to drinking-straw collapsed elbows, awful disjointed hips, and necks that look like they belong on a monster. Not only will we improve on these joints, but sometimes we will go above and beyond to add subtle deforms that give a subtle punch to the render that everyone will notice and appreciate, but unlikely even the pros will be able to explain the difference that puts your renders above-and-beyond.

In short, this series of tutorial videos will teach you the required techniques and skills to make your nude character attractive and human-looking.

We will concentrate mostly on Monette Taida, the surfer girl character pictured on this page. She is thin, but not overly so, with enough fatty portions to make her rig more average than, eg, Lilithe Classica, whose rig must take into account how skinny she is.

Monette Taida also is a large-breasted character, which will make the breast rigging portion of the course more obviously beneficial.

This Lesson: The Neck

The neck, thankfully, is not a terribly difficult “joint” to rig, but it does have at least three interesting/complex sets of bones with constraints, so let’s go over those!

1. (15m57s) Trapezius top and bottom with constraints, copy location and stretch to.
2. (10m45s) SternoCleidoMastoid addition and ensuring everything is a proper child of things.
3. (9m29s) Throat stretch bones and making more pronounced the sternocleidomastoids.

For discussion about this tutorial series, come to the Discord to chat with the community: https://discord.gg/7rFDMEYVzj is the invite link.

A free technical overview can be found on https://faemalia.net/tutorials/rigging-the-female-nude-with-blender-neck/.

This neck tutorial and images are all SFW, though there is a larger tutorial series about rigging the nude which are covered elsewhere.