Dissecting Rigify?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi,

I’m fairly newbie’ish and I’m trying to figure out rigs and rigging. I’ve successfully set up a model using Rigify and the Human(meta-rig) armature following web tutorials. And all works correctly, except I wish elves would come late at night and clean up my vertex weights.

I’m kind of visual and learn a lot better(and have more fun) when I can tear something apart while reading about how it’s put together. What I’m looking for is a decent explanation of just what Rigify has done and how the myriad of items it created are interconnected. From my perspective it is a really neat FX/IK rig, but I’d like documentation that explains how the pieces fit together, in order to understand better how to put similar pieces together myself.

I’ve searched but haven’t been able to figure out the keywords that lead me to the document I’m looking for.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

2

I don’t know if a full explanation of rigify exists but if you want to understand more rigging with IK/FK switcher, custom properties, stuff like that, you can find some good tutorials on blender cookie for instance.
Also, this tutorial describes how to create a good and simple rig (a bit simpler than rigify rig though) from start to finish.
Furthermore, with this DVD from the same author, you can learn how to get an as complex and efficient rig than rigify one.
In my opinion, these are good documents to understand rigging.

3

Unfortunately Riggify is not well documented… Riggify honestly is a system that has been designed to be a ‘quick’ setup time saver for people who already know something about Rigging… it’s not that geared IMHO to newbee’s… Having said that… I wished I had something like this when ever I first started Rigging… it would have made learning the 'why’s and ‘what for’s’ alot easier…

Go here and go through some of these vids also…




That should get you started on Riggify…
4

There’s some interesting behind-the-scenes talk in Blender Podcast 8 (http://blender-podcast.org/), much of it precisely about documentation.

5

wow that was cool didn’t know about the blender pod cast… Thanks… :eek::eek:

6

Thanks for the pointers guys. I’m looking into it. I’ve recently been logging into Vista rather than Xubuntu and had to(should have already) loaded the open codecs to play .ogg files. Just got the pod cast playing now.

Thanks again.

7

A better way to pick apart rigify is to use individual parts for learning:

Create a new single-bone armature.
In the armature panel, scroll down to the rigify options and “Add Sample” for different rigify parts, then generate rigs that way. I recommend starting with the finger, as it is pretty simple and only has three primary bones.
Remember: armatures have their own layers, and rigify generates many of them! Try turning on/off their visibility to see the many parts of the rig.