Re-using a skeleton and his rig.

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello everyone,

I was just wondering If that was possible to re-use/transfert a RIG created on a low poly character for some others low polies characters.

And if It’s possible, what are the constraints of this technic ?

If possible:

  • Will I have to keep the same proportions for each character ?
  • Will It be possible to scale/change the size of bones or shape without any trouble ?
2

This is possible, and it is definitely a time saver. You don’t have to build a new armature, which alone without naming can be a pain in the butt! Also, it’s very easy to adjust proportions of an armature, so it won’t limit the way you model your characters. The only remaining trouble is that you will have to reapply and adjust weights for each new model, but you would have had to do that anyway.

Hope this helps!

3

Yes, before parenting your other models to the armature, make sure that you adjust your armature/bones in edit mode, NOT object mode, to match the character proportion. However, some characters might won’t have a proportional scale, so you will need to adjust individual bones too.

Ideally the armature scale (object mode) should remain always 1, as well as the location 0,0,0, to avoid problems when importing/sharing.

Sharing animations of the same rig might not look right in characters of different proportions

4

Hello, thank you for your replies. In this case, these characters will be humanoïd, proportions might be a bit differents according the character. So after thinking a little more about that. I won’t use my own rig, as there is already rigify inside Blender. That would be stupid to use another one, probably less effective. I think I better have to model each character and then for each one use rigify and adapt the bones and the weighting. And once that’s done, generate the constraints, as there is a button to do that in one single click. :smiley:

However in the case I would use my own rig, with its own constraints, I was wondering If constraints would be kept once the armature is used on another character. (As I wouldn’t be able to generate constraints according the character like rigify).

But It’s seems It’s possible from what you tell me. So that’s quite handy if we don’t have to redo all the constraints.
Might be useful in the case with need a more specific setup that needs to be repeated, i.e: for a quadruped character. Unless we can use rigify for it as well, but I don’t know yet about that… :confused: