Creating a Pose Library and using the Pose Library Thumbnails Addon in Blender 2.91

Today, we're going to talk about the post library that comes in Blender, which not everybody knows about. And also the post library thumbnails add-on, which is an old add-on that Sieber and Stuble has been maintaining lately because they use it in the Blender animation studio. And I think everybody should use it for their productions because it makes things easier. It's not a fully fledged animation and post library, like the studio library that you'd find in Maya, which is sad because it's been too long that we've needed one, but that's what we get. So I'm Luciano and welcome to the adventures of Lollipop Dan. This episode is sponsored by me. Use the code below to get 10% discount on any of my products. Been a long time since I've created a new video, but with the illusion of scheduling, you've gotten a video every week, but really those videos were done about a month ago. And I've actually taken a little bit of a holiday of creating videos because I was working on creating my new course that it's going to take a little bit longer than I expected because a lot of work has come through lately and has kind of gotten in the way. And also that I want it to be well done. So I'll keep you posted on what's going on there. I'm Luciano and I teach about Blender and animation. I'm a animator with a couple of years of experience. I've worked in a few features and now I'm working on my first Blender feature with the studio in the Netherlands, which I'm super excited about because it's the first time I actually have the chance to work on a feature made in Blender. So if you're new to the channel and you're interested in animation and even more so animation in Blender, definitely subscribe, give a like if you like the content and yeah, let's check out how this works. So here I have Jane rig. And as you can see, I've already created some poses so you can see, you have these little buttons here. These ones are for reordering them. There's two, one at the top to create and delete poses. And then this one to apply whatever pose to your rig as you see fit, right? Even if I don't have anything selected within the rig, it will still apply the pose. If I deselect anything and get fists, then you still get a fist. So that's one thing. So we got a few poses for one hand and really we can't do it in a simple way, like to copy that to the other side. It's with the default system. It's kind of off the question. Luckily, because I haven't set any keys and none of these are setting keys, so I can easily just copy and paste inverted if I wanted to do that. And then that will copy the pose to the other side and then you can key it. But it's a little bit of a hassle, right? First, before we move forward into the pose library add-on, we'll figure out how to create this. So super easy. This is the one that I created for the hands. And now I'm just going to create one for the face. So I'm going to close this. As you can see, I click this. You should click it. So when you get rid of this, then it stays stored in the file and we're going to create a new one. And it's going to be called Jane Facials, right? So let's say that's our pose. And so we want to basically save that pose. We're going to keep the rest zeroed out. Then this guy is there. And then, and so, because we're going to add new pose, right? And so I can reset everything and then apply the pose and we get, ah, right. And so we're going to reset everything again. And now we're going to install and turn on the pose library add-on. So we're going to go to a link, pose library, and so we're going to go here. And then from here, which is the original author. But now if you go here, you can find Sebring's repository with the latest version, but you don't want to download it from here directly. You want to go here to releases and then pick up this version here, which is ready to install. Once you do that, then you go edit preferences and then install, and then you'll find add-ons and that's where I downloaded it right here. And you should get this pose library thumbnails 2.2, which is the version that currently is available. Once you install it, you can type here or it should appear, but you can still type it and then you get this one and you turn it on and then rapidly it starts turning on things here, right? So now this lets you set the rig prefix and the pose library name, if you're using kind of stuff like that, so that helps. So now we want to be able to create those libraries. And so for that, you need to create the images manually, right? And so I'm going to bring this camera that I created already, put it in front of her. I'm going to do a library for the face. Interestingly, we can't see anything. It's because the clipping is very small, which I'm going to push it back. Now we can see her, right? So if I push forward and make sure you make the resolution square, no matter if it's a 1080 or 512, it could be 512, probably because it will load faster the images, so let's do 512 by 512. And so make sure you can get it something like so, and now we get the mouth there, which is what we want. And now we're going to go like post by post, post mode, hide them and then go. Ah, so for instance, this is going to be, ah, and we're going to just, we render it with better rendering settings. So it looks prettier and then it makes it easier to see how it should look in the final one. So that's definitely recommended. And so viewport, render image, and then image save us. So we're going to put this right with the other ones and we're going to call these, ah, and I'm going to call them exactly the same as I call the library poses, because that will make it easier to find later on and then so on. So now that we have that, we can go back here and first of all, click this, which creates the right naming convention for the library facials, and we're going to go and add for each one of them, the corresponding thumbnail. So I'm going to select, ah, press add, and then in the thumbnails, just pick up that one, and now we get, ah, then I go, eh, add new one, eh, ee, I probably got the wrong one, so that's the one, ee, ee, oh, oh, now we get all of these ones working. And then if we switch to the ones with the hands, as you can see, we can see the hands working there, and also this add-on adds the apply flip option, which lets you apply it to the other hand, which is great, and so you can switch between both of them, right, so Jim and Jane facials, Jim and Jane pose library, and then flip, and yeah, so now we got a pose library with crappy mouth shapes. Interestingly enough, if you have nothing selected, it would apply it on everything. If you have some selected, it will apply it to just that. So hands, if I go hand, right, I have nothing selected, it will do it. If I only have, if I undo and only have, for instance, a couple of fingers selected, and I apply the fist, it only does the finger that I selected. So before we showed how to create the libraries and how to use them, but now we're going to link the library to put it in another character that has the same type of controls. And so for instance, now we have the Jim rig, which is the companion to Jane rig, and I'm going to go into pose mode, I'm going to go file link, and I'm going to find the Jane file that contains the library, I'm going to the actions and look for that hands, I completely forgot to save the file when I created the mouth shapes, so that's okay, and then I'm going to link this, and you're going to see that I can find here in my, in my data blocks for the actions, I can pick that one up, and if I turn on the layer that contains the hands and select the hand, I can potentially use it, right? And then I can apply flipped again and then do the same with the other hand, and that should work, right? If I click here, I'll get the proper naming convention for the thing, which I don't know what's the big deal about it, but that kind of works. And you can use it in both characters. And so you can transfer that library to another character for using as well. With a library overrides, this should work fairly similar. So there's a few limitations there, but I think it's the best we got, so that's it. Hope you enjoy, hope your production can benefit from this video. Comment below if you have any more tips and tricks, or maybe, you know, a post library that's cool that we should talk about and yeah, like if you like, subscribe and see me next time.