Stablo, on the Blender cloud, at the training section you’ll find the blenrig stuff. Just in case you’re interested in reading something, there a couple of articles on the blog about mesh deform techniques.
Hi guys! Haven’t finished publishing the rigging tutorials yet, but here’s a timelapse about how I rigged Vincent:
It’s free, so anyone can watch it!
Also, the PDF documentation has been made available for FREE, so get it here:
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Hi JP,
Thanks for showing us your workflow. One question where did you get that weight palette in weight paint mode? Is it a patch?
Hi Erick! No no, it’s just an addon, paint pallets, it comes with Blender.
Haha this addon seems to be in Blender before ErickBlender got born. Hard to find tutorial on how to use can you help us?
Erick, you can see the doc here https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Paint/Palettes
To enable, just go to user prefs in addons and toggle Paint category, and enable the palette addon there
yeah craig i have seen that i was just asking about how JP is using it in workflow, yes i have seen the time lapse and i have played with it already. I wanted some tips and hints from JP or from anyone who uses this tool in his skinning workflow.
Eirck, well, the main reason for me to use it, is because when I do weight painting, I don’t improvise weights, that is, I paint with constant values, and that is what this addon allows. It actually resembles how you did weight painting in Blender 2.4, hehe.
So, I usually paint with fixed values like, 1, 0.5, 0.125, etc. Some times I may use the blur brush a bit, but it is rarely necessary. By doing weights this way, I have more control over what I do, painting each vertex with the value I need it to have.
To sum up, it’s a boring thing to do!! 
haha, that’s why I like to do this just once, and then re-use weighted meshes for other characters.
I see Thanks 
Hi JP
I checked out the timelapse of the Vincent rigging. I wish I could do the stuff as fast as you 
I face another problem with my little pet project. My base mesh does not have its feet straight (not parallel to the y-axis). They are turned a bit outward. So i rotated the sole controller accordingly to match with the foot. This seemed to work in the reproportion mode. Since the feet are a bit turned outward, i also adjusted the bone rolls of the shin and thigh fk bones in the bone roll layer. I did the Custom Aligns too.
When leaving the reproportion mode, the sole controllers are straight again (see attached image). Is my approach the wrong one to cope with feet that are turned outward?
Kind regards
stabio
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Hi again Stablo! Yes, I did that on purpose because in animation you will get lots of headaches if the sole control is not aligned to the front. Imagine doing a walkcycle, and that for just making the foot go forwards you have to edit two different curves. That would drive anyone crazy. So, from my experience, I and all the animators I’ve worked with, prefer to have the sole controller aligned to the front, regardless if the foot is pointing somewhere else. If I were you, I would also fix the alignment of the model so that the foot is straight.
Having said that, if you still want the sole control to be aligned to the foot as it is, you have two options:
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Bake the rig as usual and run the align operators, but then, in edit mode, enable ALL the armature layers from the BLENDER armature panel, select the sole controller and all of the bones that overlap with it, and rotate it again into the position you need it to be. Then press ctrl+n and align it to the Global +Z axis
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if you have baked the rig but you want the align operators not to modify your sole controller, go into edit mode enable ALL the layers and select all the bones of the armature, then deselect the sole control and all the overlapped bones. In the align operators, check the “selected” checkbox, so that the operators run only on selected bones.
Well, that would be it, I think option 1 is easier!
See you!
Thx for the great advice. I will fix the model then and start all over with the reproportion. Seems to be the less cumbersome approach for me…
And thanks for answering all my noob questions 
Regards
stabio
No problem! Glad I could help
its a great looking rig, but for someone who recoils from the thought of rigging a character from scratch, adding in this complicated rig does not make things seem easier. looks fiddly and would probably take me the same amount of time to get this to work as it would to make it from scratch. but im sure once its working it would be fantastic to use.
Just published Update 1.02!
Brilliant. Much appreciated. Gracias mi compadre!
Hi cooler!
No, I haven’t had the time to get into that, although from what I’ve tested, it wouldn’t be much harder than making a basic humanoid rig follow the blenrig armature with copy transforms constraints, and then exporting that basic armature with the animation. Do you have any further knowledge about these game engines?
Hi cooler!
No, I haven’t had the time to get into that, although from what I’ve tested, it wouldn’t be much harder than making a basic humanoid rig follow the blenrig armature with copy transforms constraints, and then exporting that basic armature with the animation. Do you have any further knowledge about these game engines?