Help - Learning Blender Rigging (previous maya user)

Hey everyone!
I’ve just swapped over to using Blender after using Maya for several years and would appreciate some help figuring a few things out with Blender’s Rigs.
I’ve got my head around the basics, but I’m trying to figure out if Blender has an equivalent to Maya’s custom attributes and Set-Driven-Keys. for example I’m trying to rig a human-like foot, in Maya you could create custom attributes on the controller for things like toe roll, foot roll etc. Is there an equivalent to this in Blender? or would this be achieved in a completely different way?
I’ve used Blender before, but never did much with rigging until I started using Maya, but so far everything else in blender seems so much more efficient so I’d love to use it for a project I’ve been planning. I know these are probably really simple questions, but i’m pretty new to rigging in general, so any help will be appreciated!
Thanks in advance!

Hello and welcome to the forum!

Yes to the custom attributes. In blender, there are custom properties you can add to anything. This can be used to animate or drive almost anything else through constraints & drivers.

As I understand Set-driven-keys (just googled it), yes, blender supports something similar. Here again, I’m thinking drivers. With drivers, you can compare data and trigger stuff based upon the data.

It’s a bit to learn, but once you learn them, you’ve got it and it’s easy.

Randy

A great resource is the Humane Rigging series:

Ahh, I’ve seen the custom properties, but weren’t sure if they were the same thing or not. I’ll defiantly look into them some more! Thanks!
And Thank you RNavega for the tutorial series!

If you want a whole bunch of rigging questions answered—in fact, an explanation of Blender’s rigging system from the ground up—I highly recommend Nathal Vegdahl’s Humane Rigging.

Yeah great series.

Also don’t forget about BlinRig and Rigify. In case you don’t have time to rig.

Also BlinRig uses a lot of advanced features. So learning that will be real helpful to understanding the rigging process, features and options in Blender.

Most of the advanced rigging you will be doing is with drivers I think.

But also… check out Animation Nodes:

http://animation-nodes-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

I never took much notice of auto-rigging systems like Rigify to be honest. I was always told to stay away from them because they were buggy and never work right, at least the ones included in other programs (mostly maya) but from the looks of things they’re more stable in Blender, I’ll be sure to try them out on my next project.
Also those animation nodes look really cool, definitely going to look into that, Thanks!

I have to say after getting over this initial learning curve, I’m really liking Blender’s rigging system. It seems more user friendly and I feel like I have a lot more control over things now that I’ve got my head around drivers.

Thanks again everyone for the help!

This is old. But look into BlenRig 5. It is more advanced than Rigify.