I do understand rigging, and the cause of common rigging errors (ea un applied scaling, wrong origins).
One of my test files had some figures imported but without rigs.
So i added the metarig, scaled it all to fit, placed in the center of the grid, kept origin of bones and mesh at same position. Well all should be fine, also put them in the same collection.
However when i try to aply weights automatic, suddenly model and mesh are at different places, and scales.
So is rigify not possible at the moment, or is there some 2.8 setting that i’m not aware off ?.
Rigify is not working with 2.8. There is a warning indicating that an upgrade is required for 2.8.
It is an addon and as is, its upgrade is dependent of establishment of Python API which is dependent of the fact that operators are working or have been restored.
So, it will take time before being able to rig with it in 2.8.
All the addons and scripts need to be converted to 2.8 API.
It shouldn’t be too much work. But for example, when a script want to put an object on a layer, now that there are collections , the script isn’t working anymore. Same goes for the way scripts access to objects. And several other small stuff.
As the API may still change a bit, 2.7 addon conversion hasn’t started.
Some addons like node wrangler still work a bit because they don’t refer to what as changed in 2.8. But many addons related to 3Dview, layers , 3D objects won’t work until the conversion.
No official announcement yet …
At least if it’s for testing you can still Ctrl+C + Ctrl +V your character from 2.8 into 2.79 and rig it there.
You can then link it in 2.8 and make a proxy as usual…
For now weight paint mode in 2.8 misses some tweak to be usable without too much suffer, mesh also don’t have their modifier activated when in edit / weight paint. Even if rigify was working it would be difficult to finish the character in 2.8.
Also , I think before converting addons, dev’s need to port 1 or 2 big addons shipped with blender to see how they integrate with the new interface. I think we need to wait for a few month so all the pieces comes together.
IMO the big chunk of work to be done is finishing OpenSubdiv integration, if I understand correctly modifier in edit mode depend on that. I guess when that’s ready 2.8 will feel much more usable.
I hope they’ll find time to work on dynamic overhide, that’s something I’m really looking forward in 2.8.
Hum, it’s not a direct relation, but as you always need to tweak skinning when rigging
and modifier in weight paint / edit mode will be enabled after open subdiv integration .
Then using rigify efficiently is kind of related to opensubdiv, at least in my head
Oh ok, i rarely use weight paint adjustments in character rigging.
I more often add or move bones, or adjust the mesh (splitting extra edges).
In my work flow i usually do a few times automatic weight painting till it behaves right.
But for machines (where i dont use rigify) i do manual weight most of the times.
Kinda funny in a way that Blender has so many ways how people work with it.
Multiple path’s to the similar end results.
In my last stuff i used skin snapping to lay down bones and with proper parenting made sure some torso area’s where more behaving like there was bone under the flesh (ea not like spine bone affects upper front torso). but that was on 2.79
I wanted to try this method also with 2.8 (where bones could be put to different layers), so complex bone systems aded to rigify for better skin shapes… but i’ll just wait, its a little experiment.
I think right now, the main thing people are doing for characters is just making their own (non-script based) rigs in 2.7 and then porting them to 2.8 once they are done.
A manual fix.
Maybe useful to others to better understand what’s going wrong with rigify currently, to script it
I had some time left today and wondered what caused the offset once i apply rigify (i know how to use rigify, but something behaves odd in 2.8). Normally i would do cursor to center, model standing on center, origin to cursor, add skeleton and do automatic weight point. The effect was that objects suddenly appeared large somewhere else on the viewport. (and yes this happened while I did apply scale and transforms first to mesh and skeleton).
Well i got closer to cause/solution. (but not a script fix).
There is something changed about origins in 2.8, instead of doing everything at the center of my 3d View.
Using “set origin”, i noticed the comand “clear origin”, and despite this was set to the center (so one would think there is only one center and I’ve just setted it)… apparently there are more origins in 2.8…??
Because once I cleared the origin my model moved to another place in the viewport.
This time though i put the cursor to the mesh model.
And then I moved the skeleton towards the mesh model (object to cursor).
I rigged with automatic weights.
Again the human model poped up elsewhere.
Then though i took the model(s) [body+head] both in Edit mode (glad that’s possible now).
And then I moved and scaled it to the rigify mesh (manually, not that ideal).
Then i went to pose mode.
And well almost there if i moved a bone, the other side would move (ea right leg bone moved left leg).
So then I took the skeleton i Edit mode, selected all, applied X scale of -1
And then basic rigify seams to work, i could start to animate the model.
I do think though this is great news, now its (with some labor) possible to use rigify and use it with eevee
And since its 2.8 i moved the skeleton to a sub collection of the mesh (to easily hide it) no problemo…
First impression of animating…eevee is super for this.
After a while however i lost the ability to select bones (only with cursor select) and although the timeline earlies showed all animation points, now somehow i lost them (while the animation still works) somehow (unclear) i got back the capability to edit them normally and see them in the timeline
