Meta rig modification

So I just had a thought about this question and decided to ask before I make the attempt. The question is if you make a Meta Rig and add more bones to it, for example, bones in the face to drive for the shape keys and activate the Rigify button, will that mess up the process in any way?

When you Rigify, the process adds widget as well. Adding extra bones may mess up the process. But, you can always add bones after Rigify, and manually create vertex groups associated with particular facial bones.

The way I did it was to generate a Rigify rig, then build a separate rig for the face and join them. I found it far less confusing that way. In the facial rig, build a ‘head’ bone (named slightly differently; maybe: facialHead or something) and use it as the parent for the overall facial rig. Then, after joining the two rigs, any facial bones that have facialHead as its immediate parent, change the parent to ‘head’ (the bone from the Rigify rig) and delete facialHead.

@Ridix: I had a feeling something like that was going to happen.
@Rontarrant: I actually tried the facial rig that was made by that guy from Asia. ( I really don’t know which country he’s from, so I’ll just say that on the safe side.) It was ok but it really deformed my character’s face. I’ll try it again later on today.

But overall, I have to use Rigify, then create facial bones after its done. Thanks for the advice.

Alright I’m back again. This time with a different problem. For some odd reason, after using the Rigify Feature. My character’s mouth opens up when I tilt his head back.


Has anyone came across this problem before and if so, how was it fixed?

It may be a weight-painting issue, but I’m not 100% sure. It’s something you could check while you’re waiting for someone else to jump in.

See if any of the vertices around the mouth are being influenced by the neck bone or any other bone in close proximity to the head. If you need to know more about weight-painting, see some of these tutorials.

Ron, you called it. It was a weight-painting issue. Turns out that three vertex groups were holding them back. Thanks.

Hopefully, three’s the charm. So I have another problem dealing with the Rigfy Armature. I added facial bones to the armature but when I offest the bones to the head, they are in a different position in pose mode. So I’m going to post the link to the file and and hopefully someone can point out what I did wrong. Th actually body hasn’t been weighted to the armature yet, so I’ll deal with that later. But my main concern is the offset problem.

http://www.mediafire.com/?jqfxiul5yqh1tyd

Could you please clean up your file a bit and repost? I counted:

  • 14 cameras
  • 5 rigs
  • and a crap-load of various meshes and other things.

It’s hard to know which part you want to talk about. :slight_smile:

Alright. I hid the cameras and got rid of all the extra rigs. The model is on Layer 17. I have tried to update the file again but it is stuck in queued status. I’ll continue to try and upload the less cluttered file.

The old link is down and the new link is up. http://www.mediafire.com/?thi3w2bvcqb8a85

It looks like you moved the rig in Pose Mode before you attached the hair object (Plane.010).

Mark where the hair is now by:

  • selecting the hair,
  • Shift-S -> Snap Cursor to Selected.

Detach the hair from its parent:

  • in Properties,
  • click on the Object tab (the cube icon)
  • scroll down to the Relations panel and open it,
  • where it says Parent,
  • click in the text box where it says “rig”
  • clear the box and hit Enter.

Now select any bone in the facial rig and in Pose Mode:

  • Alt-G, Alt-R, Alt-S (likely you won’t need to do the second and third, but just to be sure your rig is back in its default position, do all of them)

Put the hair back where you want it:

  • select the hair object,
  • Shift-S -> Snap Selected to Cursor.

And finally, parent it to the bone again:

  • select the hair,
  • in the Outliner, find your rig (called “rig”) (it’s near the bottom of the list)
  • click the plus sign beside rig,
  • find Pose,
  • click the plus sign to open that,
  • while holding Shift (so you can multi-select the hair and the head bone),
  • click on head (in the Outliner, in case that’s not clear),
  • Ctrl-P -> Bone to attach it to the bone (as opposed to doing weights, etc.)

Now it should behave.

I’ve tried to select the head bone by highlighting the hair and holding shift. But when I click on the head bone while doing that, the hair mesh is deselected. I kept trying to do that for 15 minutes. This rig is really giving me a headache…

I wonder if there is a way to copy the vertex group from one mesh that’s parented to a armature and paste it to a mesh to a Biped armature?

Are you sure you have the rig in Pose Mode? If you’re in Edit Mode, it won’t work.

It was in pose mode when I performed that last step.

I just found the answer to that Hair wig problem and a good thing too! I was just about to start on a creating a different armature rig all together. Instead of going into the Outliner and trying to select it that way, I went into the relation section and I realized that when the Rigfiy rig created, it was created 2 different bones, the Head bone and the DEF-Head bone. If I choose the DEF-head bone then it can move along with the head as normal. Now that this problem is solved, hopefully I can continue on and hope that I don’t come across another armature problem.

This is the first time I’m using the Rigfiy armature in my project. I think that autoweighting the armature to the mesh has worked well for me in that past.