In this Blender animation

tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can make a quick bendy bone rig.

This is great for simple stylized animations in Blender

where you want to bend a cylinder arm or some sort of worm character.

It can be used for lots of things, and it’s very easy to set up and rig.

First, in object mode in Blender, press shift A

and make a new armature and select single bone.

I’ll click X so I can look directly to the side of the bone.

Over on the right hand side.

If I click the data panel and then viewport display

instead of octahedral, which is the default shape for bones

in Blender, I’ll select b bone, which means bendy bone.

If I tab in to edit mode, I can select the top part of the bone.

Press G, then Z to bring it down.

If I press E to

extrude then z, I can extrude the bone up.

Now I have a section in the middle.

I need to extrude one more time, so I’ll press E,

z and then extrude up a bit.

Select the top bone.

Then press option or alt P and disconnect the bone.

Then press option or alt P again and clear the parent.

Now let’s label the bones.

If I click on bone down at the bottom here, we can see that this is bone two.

Let’s go ahead and label this end.

The middle bone.

We can label bendy bone.

And the bottom bone will label start.

Select the bendy bone.

Then under armature at the top left select

transform scale bendy bone.

Then just move your mouse and scale it down.

Then finally, with the bendy bone selected

under bendy bones on the right hand side, under the bone menu.

You can select how many segments you want your bendy bone to have.

Select something like 25 or 20.

Depending on how long your bendy bone is.

Now we’re ready to set up the rigging.

For this bendy bone in Blender.

Switch from edit mode to Pose mode,

then select the top bone right here.

So this is the end bone.

Then hold shift and select the bendy bone

with control shift C or Command shift C.

You can get this menu up and we’re going to add a stretch to constraint.

Then if I click the top bone and press G you’ll see that the bendy bone follows.

But if I press R to rotate

does not work so well.

So let’s fix that. Select the bendy bone.

Then at the very bottom you can see start handle.

Select absolute

and start.

So now this uses a to start bone for the start handle.

Then for the end handle choose absolute and choose end.

Now if I move this around,

you can see that the bendy bone follows the way that this rotates.

This is great, but how do we use this in an armature

to control something in an animation?

Let’s go back to object mode.

Press shift A get a mesh.

Something like a cylinder.

I’m going to press GZ1 and then S to scale.

But press shift z to scale it only in the horizontal direction.

And then we can scale it just a little bit on the z direction by pressing s z,

then g z.

Press Ctrl a for all transform.

before we are able to make this into an armature,

we need to add some geometry

and segments for it to be able to deform tab into edit mode.

Press control R to add and loops.

Use your mouse wheel to scroll and add a bunch of end loops.

Tap back into object mode.

Select the mesh that you wanted to form.

Then hold shift.

Select the bendy bone armature

under object

parent

armature.

Deform with automatic weights.

Then select pose mode and if I press G, I can move my bendy bone

and it rotates and bends the armature just fine.

So this can be a really easy way to add simple animation to stylized characters.

Or had this little cylinder be a character all on its own.

It could bounce around and do many different things.

So hopefully this allows you to quickly make bendy bones in Blender.

Happy 3D modeling!