Is there any update on the “rigging-done-automatically-by software” story?
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Well, this certainly seems to me to be an obvious area where the computer can be of greater assistance to animators . . . AI algorithms should work quite well here. Bring 'em on … “I’m a card-carrying lazy person!” 
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when you write “update”… is there already something in place?
edit: and perhaps a link to that, please? lol
Cascadeur use physics laws & AI to assist animators:
There’s also RigNet :
https://zhan-xu.github.io/rig-net/
There are also solutions to animate characters thanks to detection of characters movements from webcams or videos:
CEB Easymocap Monocular : https://carlosedubarreto.gumroad.com/l/ceb_em_monocular
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Hey, thanks for aaaaaall of that, xan So when is “AI rigging” going to be right inside Blender??
No, it’s just that I had asked this question before here…
I recently also seen this, not in blender but looks interesting: https://actorcore.reallusion.com/auto-rig
This is just Mixamo, but you have to pay to do pretty much anything with the generated rigs. I was very disappointed by it.
That being said, Mixamo is an actually free auto-rigger, but you’re not going to get super fine tuned control. You won’t with any auto-rigger, to be honest
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Well, yes and no, but mostly no. While unlike Mixamo, the mocap library isn’t free, the autorigging itself is free, and there’s no paywall for exporting it. So you can do anything with it you’d do with one of your own rigs as they wouldn’t come with a mocap library either. Now I did find the Blender fbx export virtually impossible to import into Blender correctly but using the Unreal export worked fine.
Just needs some batch renaming to have the bone naming schema compatible with symmetry (same as Mixamo), and there’s a number of “extra” junk bones to clean out of it. It has some bones set up to be IK controls as well, but the IK controls still have to be set up manually. It’s not something I plan to use seriously, and won’t put professional riggers out of work, but it’s good for an autorigger.
The results are considerably better than Mixamo because Mixamo doesn’t know where shoulders are and doesn’t let the user tell it. AccurRig’s auto weights are decent, but of course still need some touchup as any auto-rigger would. Beats Blender’s autoweights however. I was impressed with the shoulder deformation, the knees were decent (though I’ve done better), and the elbows were okay enough you could probably get away without tweaking if you wanted to avoid it, but the ankles were definitely an issue and the wrists had some downright buggy vertex assignment, but easily cleaned in Blender. I wasn’t too impressed with the hip/butt area, but I’ve seen worse.
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@VertexMachine You can export the rig from AccuRig and import it into Blender. I recommend the Unreal export instead of the Blender export because the Blender fbx seemed to be impossible to import correctly no matter the settings, whereas one youtube video on importing Unreal rigs to Blender and you can get the Unreal export of AccuRig imported correctly the first or second time.
The imported result is not immediately usable as it has a number of distracting junk bones that need to either be removed or moved to a hidden layer out of the way, and their bone naming schema is not compatible with Blender symmetry. Batch renaming will fix that.
AccuRigs autoweights are a decent starting point for most of the rig, but some areas need a little manual cleanup. It’s not quite as impressive as it’s being hyped, but it’s a decent enough autorigger.
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Any specific name or link of the mentioned Unreal export?
It’s built into the AccuRig program.
When you finish the rigging process in the AccuRig software, to use the rigged character in another software you’ll need to export it. There are a couple of options for FBX export built into the program, you can select Blender, Unreal, Maya, and maybe one or two others.
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“Rigging” is definitely a tedious and time-consuming chore – one of the worst – which is begging for improvement. If “AI algorithms” can help do any part of that, I say, “bring it on!!”
Biped? CAT?
Sorry? What are Biped and CAT???
I’m using AutorigPro, which uses some AI for boning and skinning of bipeds. It’s a pretty great starting point, for some characters I just needed to correct a few weights. It has flexible options pre-generation like “how many fingers?” or “how many spine controllers”. You just place a few markers, the rest is auto-detect, which is way faster than Rigify’s metarig.
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