I am moving to Blender from another program and I have a character I would like to rig.
I would like to use Rigify to rig my character, but a few questions popped up. Hopefully I will get them answered here:
The face rig that comes with Rigify looks good, however I may wish to make my own custom face rig instead. What is the best way to do this? Can I make the Human Rig and just delete the bones that comprise the face rig? Do I also need to go into the properties panel and make some adjustments there as well? What about bone collections? How can I get a Rigify Rig to forget the native face rig?
Assuming that I can successfully remove the built-in face rig, how do I then add the new bones for the face to the rig. Can you just add them to the armature, or is there some magic that you need to do to attach them to the rig and do something to the bones? Or maybe create them in a second armature and somehow attach that armature to the Rigify rig?
Also, sometimes I add other bones to my rig to do specialized things and add constraints to them based on the main bones of the rig. Can I just add them to the armature and constrain them to the Rigify rig bones as needed?
You can just add the Basic Human metarig, which has nothing more then the head bone. Then you can manually build whatever face rig you want on top of that.
In many ways you have a couple of options. You could create a face rig using the various base Rigify Types within the metarig and build up to what you want. Having said that, I suspect you’d hit a number of road blocks, as the basic types may not have everything you need, as it’s more all built into the main face Rigify type.
Second, and this applies to anything, you can just totally build a complete face rig, so all deform bones, controller bones with custom shapes, various constraints, etc. Pretty much everything that would just work as is without Rigify at all.
But to then make it work as part of the overall Rigify metarig system, there is specific bone naming you need to use, you need to assign it all as a Rigify Raw Copy type, and of course manually set all the bone collections, assign it all to the UI layer(s) within Rigify, etc so that when you generate, it all shows up in the Rig UI (this can included custom properties).
If you want to, you can build this as a second armature to test a bit and then just join the two armatures together. Technically you can do this at either the metarig stage or once the animation control rig is generated, keeping in mind all the above about Rig UI, etc.
If it’s expected and usually needed special bones, etc then just as above, you could add them to the metarig and then once generated, they would be there to use or ignore.
Otherwise, once the Rig is generated, you can edit and change that as much as you like. But keep in mind, if you then go back and re-generate from the metarig, any changes made will just get wiped out. Depending on your needs and python skills, you can run a post generation script to automatically do any changes to the generated Rig everytime.
So, having said all that, for what’s it worth, this is what I’ve done.
I kept the default Rigify face rig, but I then made a number of changes to the metarig to give me more control and options (I even have a video as a basic example of some of what I’ve done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXHwcNlB3RI)
I have then also added a number of full custom bits to the metarig that just get totally copied over to the generated rig. This has included extra controls for hip and shoulder deformation and recently a whole little rig for a pair of glasses, including a custom property for the parent setup, that will snap the glasses to the head or the left/right hand.
I then also have a post generation script that adjusts a few things every time the rig is built. Now sure this was all a bunch of extra work, not just to do it, but to make it all working within the Rigify metarig system. However, in my case, while building up the character, the rig, etc I was re-generating the control rig many many many times. So from that point of view it was worth it.
Add to that, I now also have a pretty good rig setup that I can use on similar human type characters by just positing the placement of the metarig bones to match another mesh proportions.
Yes, that is what I wanted to do initially, but I wanted fingers which the Basic Human Metarig does not have. However, perhaps it is less confusing for the system to start with the basic human rig and add fingers so it is easier on the system. It should be no problem to add fingers to the basic rig, correct? Would you be kind enough to let me know the best way to do that? Do you need to specify the bones a certain way or add them to a bone group or something?
I think that is what I would prefer.
It honestly sounds a bit involved, but I will try to figure it out. I will make the bones Rigify Raw Copy as you say. When you say manually set all the bone collections, do I have to make new bone collections for the bones that I add? I am not sure I understand what you mean by the UI Layers withing Rigify. What is that? Is that found in the properties panel under the armature settings?
That sounds like a good plan, to build it as a second armature. How do you then join two armatures together?
Hmm. sounds like it could be tricky.
Interesting video. I may watch it a few more times.
All in all, It sounds doable but there is a lot to pay attention to. I think it would be nice to start with the basic human rig if I can just add fingers to it. I wish there was a tutorial on that as well as a tutorial on adding your own non Rigify face rig to it. That would be useful.
In any case I guess I am just going to have to get my hands dirty and see if I can pull it off.
Honestly, I kind of would almost rather build my own rig from scratch because there are a few things that I like to do that I can just build into the rig without having to worry about Rigify. The only thing that I kind of wanted to use Rigify for was for the IK-FK blending.
Then again, I almost always use IK for the feet and FK for the arms.
OK, well then just use the full main metarig and delete all of the face, leaving just the head bone.
No, you can just use the existing setup within Rigify.
They all show up in the N panel once you generate a rig. First thing I’d likely do is just play around with general Rigify, see how it works, see what it generates and the type of animation controls and options it creates.
Like anything it works on a specific system, which one can mess up if you don’t know about it. For example, there are some bones that aren’t connected, but are exactly snapped on top of each other. They need to be moved together, or generation errors show up.
Ctrl-J, at the end of the day, an Armature is much like any other object in Blender, so the standard join command works just the same.
No one ever said rigging was easy, no matter how you go about it.