Adding a mesh deform cage to rigify

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Has anyone added a mesh deform cage to the rigify script?

I was getting frustrated with skinning in the new blender. Simple things like add and subtract visual aid in the view port for weight painting, constant adjustments for shoulder and hip joints, etc., ability to highlight multiple weights on the model easily, better shortcuts for add and subtract blend brushes, etc. So I thought that this process would be a whole lot easier by just converting the rigify rig to include a mesh deform cage for the shoulders and hips.

Has anyone attempted to modify rigify to add a simple shoulder and hip deform cage or successfully added one later in the workflow? It seems to me that this would greatly help in skinning a character with layered clothing.

2

Making a full body mesh deform cage, like you’d have with Blenrig, is easy-- just weight your cage to the Rigify rig instead of your mesh.

A mesh deform cage for only the shoulders and hips wouldn’t work very well. You could exclude those vertex groups from the armature modifier and then mesh deform them instead, but only if you had really sharp weight divisions. A sufficiently strong corrective smooth might take care of the transition. Or, you could armature deform and do a dynamic mesh deform on top of that, but that’s just a way to tweak your mesh-- it’s not going to fix problems with the underlying weights.