Hi folks, wasn’t sure if this belonged in “python and plugins” or in “animation” so decided to post it here, since it’s a wip.
We’re working on a little autorigging script, already in use in the tube project that might be interesting to animators to track- after some internal testing and bugfixing, we’ll release it gpl.
you can see a little preview videohere
The idea is to create the ability to have either entire rigs or templates for bodyparts (what you see in the demo is the latter) and use etchaton or simply repostion the joints to get the rig working on new characters.
Though the video is 20 mins long it is only that long because I’m talking- I rehearsed it right before I did the capture, and managed to rig the 6 legs of the cockroach in roughly one minute.
That is pretty darn cool! As you mention it here though, it doesn’t appear to do anything that etch-a-ton doesn’t already do, but all the other stuff about fixing the rolls and realiging stuff would be such a timesaver!! It’s one of the things you just keep checking every time you change something in editmode.
Is it also possible with rigamarule to pose a rig, and apply that position to editmode? I know there is a script around that also does that somewhere.
And the extra “ID scripts” are they copied onto the newly created rig, or are they only part of the template rig? Because I can see why it’s really good for having it in the template, but in a final rig, would you still want those to be there?
How does it know to which bones to align to the world when using the etchafix option? Does it just use the bones in the template that happen to be aligned?
I’d love to try this someday.
Actually, that’s been a builtin feature for a few releases now. Just Ctrl-A in PoseMode.
slikdigit: This is certainly an interesting approach which I’m sure will get more powerful over time…
hey thanks.
freakydude actually, it does everything etchaton doesn’t do and doesn’t duplicate much functionality- that was partially the motivation: etchaton is great for the geometry bones, and whatever is close to them/on them, but as you get farther away you get the bones duplicated, just not in the right places/orientations.
rigamarule takes care of that bit- it doesn’t duplicate bones, it just makes sure they’re in the right place. that way instead of etchaton + tweak, you get etchaton + run rigamarule once.
The system is extensible, so I hope to e.g. try some approaches / rules for fixing actions in action constraints, and tweaking constraint limits, so even those are etchatonable/retagetable. Also it should be easily extensible to hooks, curves, lattices (other stuff etchaton doesn’t touch)- in this case it would have to take care of duplication as well as placement.
Oh the ID scripts are in the new rig as well as the template. There is a fourth script I didn’t demo (dr taggert) that can automatically add ids, and also clean them. It would also be trivial to add functionality to clean all the rule scripts from a production rig, in the case there’s a speed downside to having a bunch of python constraints (even nonfunctional ones) hanging around in your armature.