BlenRig 6 Release

Hi cooler, nop, reproportion has nothing to do with this.

I would just go to edit mode and only see the Bone Rolls layer and then adjust the roll of hand_def_L bone. While still in edit mode, you press the custom aligns button, that should align all the corresponding bones to hand_def_L. Then you can go back to pose mode.

I just tested it and it still working well in the latest Blender build.

thank you, man!

Hi, I had another question. I use shape keys to change some of the look of my model. But when I have the keys applied, and rotate the rig, the keys seem to move the mesh to odd locations instead of keeping it as it was in it’s rest pose.

Here’s a pic of the default model:

heres the shape key I made applied:

And here’s the model when I have the shape key applied and rotated the rig 90 degrees on the Z axis:

The shape key doesn’t seem to follow the rigs rotation correctly, and it does this on all my keys on any part of my mesh. Is there a way to fix this? Thanks for your time.

I just stumbled into this thread. Normally, I would create my own rig as of late. But I saw the facial rig on this…

^)>>)^ deep breath >)>>)> Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude! Sweet Merciful of crap! This beats the one I had to reverse engineer by light years! It makes me want to try and study this rig now!

Lol XeroShadow

Donan, yes, this is because of how mesh deform works. If you want to use shapekeys on the body mesh, you need to bind the modifier with the dynamic option enabled. The downside of that is that file size will increase and performance will go down a little. Whenever I can, I prefer to use shapekeys on the mesh deform cage rather than on the model itself. But well, if you really need to do it that way, the dynamic option is the way.

Hi jpbouza,

is there a right way to export animation with Blenrig into alembic?
have you tested it?

Hi Cooler!

I haven’t tested Alembic much, but I’m not sure if it exports bone animatino. I tested importing bone animation and it didn’t work, so I don’t think it is currently supported, though I migh be wrong.
Anyway, as with any other complex rig, it is never a good idea to export the rig itself, as it is almost impossible to share that kind of data with other softwares. But what you can do is to directly export the mesh animation with Alembic, like a mesh cache.

Yeap, Point Cache is a very good solution and I’m using it all the time. The only thing it’s a slow pipeline comparing to Alembic.
Hope it’ll be usable in the future for Blenrig etc.

Cooler, but why would you like to use Alembic with the rig data? A game? In which other program are you trying to open the character?

Alembic is not a data interchange format; it’s used to pass animated scene data around (mesh, camera, particles, hair). Exporting ABC archives with blenrig works perfectly well. Just select the mesh parts you want to export, set the frame range, unpacked UVs and “selected only” options in the export settings and your archive should export just fine. Keep in mind that exporting linked meshes is currently not supported, so you will need to make any linked/proxied character local before export.

Tested with Vincent and imported into Maya 2016.5 without issue.

Cool Italic_, good to know!

Yeah, so no bones exporting yet, right? Just meshes, objects and particles.

Yep. Bones and constraints are especially difficult because every package handles them differently. Constraints are nearly impossible in FBX as well, even between two AD suites. In school, ABC was used mostly for sending animation and camera over to simulation, then passed on to lighting/shading.

Marvelous Designer, 3dsmax (for some needs), UE4

Thanks for this, works fine! There’s enabled pack UVs by default and we have to turn off.

Hello JP!

First of all, congrats for this amazing tool, Blenrig 5! I’ve just started using it, and I find it’s awesome , so far.

I would like to know: is it possible to replace the mdef_cage by another one that suits our character in a better way?
(For example, I am trying to rig the Mr Hotdog character from BCloud, and he doesn’t have legs) How would you do it?

Thanks in advance! :slight_smile:

Hi senorpotato! :slight_smile:

Yeah absolutely. If you want you can create a new mdef object and weight paint it yourself with the deformation bones, but I would find it easier to just reproportion the rig along with the original mdef cage, I would bake everything, and then I would just erase the legs from the mdef cage. Remember that the mdef object must always be a closed mesh, so once you erase the legs, cover the holes!

Greetings Juan. Took your advice and came here to show my interesting problem. It concerns the foot roll. I’ll just post the picture.


obviously, the footroll isn’t doing what it should, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what I did wrong. Have you seen this before? and any recommendations on how to repair.

Mark

Hi odysseus!

Did you go into Edit mode and press the “fix joints” and “calc rolls” buttons in the BlenRig Rigging Panel? That will fix the orientations and roll angles of the bones in case something got messed up during the baking process.

Apart from that, the last two joints of the foot are actually the toes, so they should be places much more to the front of the foot. So, the first joint should go from the ankle to where the toes start.

Here’s an image to describe how it should be.


Ah. I hadn’t actually gotten that far! okey dokey, will readjust and proceed.

Thanks! will keep aprised…

Okay, was starting to give it a go again. I brought BlenRig into the scene, but wanted to test it to make sure all was well before strapping it in. And there it was, that foot roll issue again, but without making adjustments at all yet…



:eek:
Is it supposed to do this? I haven’t done a thing to the rig other than bring the rig into the scene and test the various controls before scaling it to the character. Could I be doing something incredibly obvious and clueless?

Thanks for looking
Mark

hehe, no it definitely should behave like that… but fortunately enough, at the top of the screen you have a message where Blender says that you have “Auto-run” disabled!

If that is true, you should go to user preferences - file and check Auto-run Python scripts!

Save the user preferences like that! Cause that option is necessary all the time! Drivers brake without that and I don’t think the addon itself will work correctly.

Tell me how it goes!