Hi everyone,
I’m currently working on a stylized character for a 3D short film and I’ve hit a rigging roadblock in Blender. I want to use Rigify for the body and Auto-Rig Pro (ARP) for the facial rig, but I’m struggling to get them to communicate and move together seamlessly.
Here is what I have tried so far:
1. Using a “Child Of” Constraint: I added a Child Of constraint to the ARP head root bone, targeting the Rigify head/neck bone. The location follows fine, but the head refuses to rotate when I move the Rigify torso/neck. (I made sure the rotation axes in the constraint are checked, but it still won’t rotate).
2. Joining Armatures (Ctrl + J): I tried joining the ARP face rig into the Rigify body rig and parenting the bones (Keep Offset). However, doing this completely breaks my head mesh—it either disappears entirely (loses the modifier target) or drops down to the chest area due to double transforms/lost origins. I am also worried that joining them will break the custom N-panel UI scripts for both addons.
My questions are:
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What is the standard, safest workflow to parent an ARP face rig to a Rigify body rig?
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If using constraints is the best way, how do I fix the rotation issue so the face rotates naturally with the body?
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How do you properly handle the weight painting at the neck intersection without breaking the mesh?
Any tips, workarounds, or links to tutorials would be massively appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Have you tried parenting the ARP armature to the head bone of the Rigify rig with bone parenting? It’s done so that you select the rigify rig, go to pose mode, select the head bone so that it’s active, go back to object mode, select the ARP armature, shift click the rigify rig, ctrl+p and select ‘bone’.
In that case I would use a different method: in arp rig, you could select the head bone and neck bones (and all the other bones that affect the head and neck part but not face bones etc) and in edit mode duplicate them, then press p to separate them from the rig. Then you could join them into the rigify rig and parent each one of them into the corresponding rigify bones with keep offset (head duplicate bone to rigify head bone etc). Then in arp rig add a copy transforms constraint into each of the bones that you made those duplicates of, set target to be the rigify rig and the bones to be the duplicate bones that you transfered into the rigify rig. Make sure it’s set to copy world transformations. This technique works properly only if the bones are in the same places in both rigs to begin with.