I have a Rigify rig (I started wolf metarig) where I originally set up the default ear bones to go around the general shape of what I intended to be floppy ears:
Now that I know more about Rigify, I realize that this was probably the wrong approach. As you can see by the screenshot, the ears will not vertically bend with the long bones on the bottom of the ears. Plus, I really want to be able to do more subtle deformations on the ears, like have just the tips bend inward, etc.
I see a similar question in this post, but was not able to figure out how to apply the solution in that topic.
I assume I need to add some additional bones to my metarig object, then regenerate the rig…but I’m not sure how to do this. (I know how to regenerate the rig – I just don’t know how to correctly add the bones that will be controlled by the existing eye controllers that are generated by Rigify.)
Ideally, I think I want to have the metarig deformation bones like this:
No. That’s not a good approach. You don’t need more bones. You need fewer bones.
So, first, if you want to edit a rigify rig, you have to realize that it won’t be regenerable. Regenerability is one of the main selling points of Rigify. But it’s not built for custom rigs.
Second, you need to know how to build a rig from scratch. So do that first. Follow along with https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-to-rigging . After that, you’ll have a little bit more understanding of how rigs work, and how you can make changes to your rigify rig (it’s just a regular rig, with a few python doodads-- it’s not magic.)
Thanks for the info, @bandages – but I have actually delved pretty deep into rigs for several months. Not only did I thoroughly go through the Humane Rigging tutorials (and typed up nearly 300 pages of notes) but I also created my own custom Python rigging scripts based on the Humane Rigging tutorials. It was only later that I discovered that Rigify (originally created by the same person who did the Humane Rigging tutorials) actually implemented everything I had written for my own custom Python rigging scripts – and then some. So I have not only built my own rig from scratch, but I’ve also built essentially a subset of Rigify from scratch as well.
So, going back to your earlier comments…
So, first, if you want to edit a rigify rig, you have to realize that it won’t be regenerable. Regenerability is one of the main selling points of Rigify. But it’s not built for custom rigs.
To clarify – I’m not using a custom rig. I started with the Rigify wolf metarig. My question relates to how I should modify the wolf metarig so that it can have floppy ears with this sort of mesh.
Regarding this:
You don’t need more bones. You need fewer bones.
Given this comment, my question is now, when using the Rigify wolf metarig, assuming that I want to use either the existing metarig bones (ear.L, ear.L.001, ear.L.002, ear.L.003, ear.L.004) or even fewer metarig bones…where should those metarig bones be placed for “floppy” ears?
I have tried something like this, using the existing wolf metarig that’s included with Blender:
When the rig gets generated, though, the bone furthest out (the deformation bone DEF-ear.L.004) is always pointing back toward the first bone in the chain (DEF-ear.L). It appears that Rigify is expecting that the ear bones need to be assembled in a loop, hence my original ear setup.
If you just want to add floppy ears to an existing rig (not metarig), I could help you, but it sounds like you consider yourself experienced enough that this shouldn’t be a problem for you.
What I have done in the past is kind of changed the workflow a little. I move the existing ear metarig in edit somewhere I can easily delete the existing ones on the regenerated rig. Then I add usually super copy bones using Rigify add sample feature to the metarig. I position the new ears and fix all the parents. I generate the rig. Turn on all bone layers and delete the old the ear bones that came with the wolf metarig. That leaves me with just the ear bones I added. A little pain in the whatever, but it works well. Now you have the ears you want in a rig that you can regenerate.
