is there an easier way to rig a model? rigging is such a pain. can bone shapes be created by making a copy of parts of the model ,scaling down a bit, to fit inside the model? anyone reading this please help. thanks. [email protected]
Yup, rigging is a big fat old drag.
As Richard mentioned, Rigify takes a lot of the pain out of it. But, you’ll still be weight-painting and rigging character faces, but what you WON’T be doing is:
- IK/FK chains for arms and legs
- IK/FK switching mechanisms
- spines mechanisms with hip-swiveling capabilities
In other words, it saves you the trouble of creating and placing the dozens of bones that go into a modern character rigging system.
So check out this tutorial series on building an advanced face rig to compliment your use of Rigify:
CG Cookie Advanced Face Rig
NB: Be sure to watch the last one in the series before starting on your shape keys. Blender’s behaviour changed after the first five videos were done, so the last one serves as an addendum/correction.
IMO – rigify’s ability to properly rig a character depends on the model. Some complex models work great, and some simple ones turn out horrible and vice versa. I’ve been doing some rigging over the last couple of months and I’m getting better at it, but there are some things I still don’t quite understand.
Before you start willy-nilly rigify-ing a bunch of characters, I’d suggest rigging some yourself from scratch to understand weight painting, how IK works, what the constraints do, etc. Then you can use rigify and clean things up if it doesn’t work out so well. Look on YouTube for David Ward’s excellent tutorials. He does a nice job of explaining things and his presentation style is top-notch.
Yes, results can be a bit unpredictable at times. I’ve found this type of thing happens with Maya’s HumanIK as well. It seems automatic rigging is still hit-and-miss. I’ve heard people rave about auto-rigging in 3DS Max, but that’s the only one.
I’ve been through every tutorial I can get my hands on including Nathan’s Humane Rigging over the last year and a half and there are still things I don’t understand. The biggest gotcha is the contraints that don’t work as expected unless they’re used in very specific ways.
I agree it’s a good idea to do at least a few IK rigs on your own just to know how they work, but there are those among us who are rigging-challenged. I count myself in that number. I know a lot more about rigging than I did a year and a half ago, but when the number of bone chains for a single limb gets past two, I get very confused. I’m sure I’m not the only one, but my conclusion is that doing really advanced rigging with any software takes a very specific mindset. Rigify is a God-send for people like me.
Just saying. 
@rontarrant: I agree with you completely. Since I’m bascially a newb when it comes to rigging, but I’ve been able to get a few nice rigs done, I’ll post my workflow below. I won’t go into details on each part, but maybe it will help someone else who’s having a hard time getting started.
A couple of notes about the Human Meta-Rig: The feet have to be almost completely redone to get a nice foot rig; I usually add a pelvis bone to get some better hip poses; and you’ll have to add bones for the hand/foot IK. You could use Rigify to get all these things, but the whole point of my typing all this is so that you can get your hands dirty.
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After I’ve got my model around 99% done I’ll apply the mirror modifiers if there are any. I say 99% done because invariably, I’ll need to tweak some things after it’s rigged due to unforeseen topology issues. If the character will be clothed, I save that for later and either hide the clothes or model them afterwards. Hair and eyebrows are another issue that has different solutions, so I won’t go into that.
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I add a Human Metarig (shift+A > Armature > Human (Meta-Rig) ). This provides a fast way to get a basic rig together, even though I have no intention of using Rigify. At this point, I’ll re-size the model to roughly line up with the rig using the 3d cursor at the origin as the scaling point. Delete the bones on the right side of the character then move the bones into their proper places on the remaining bones. I’ve found that you can always move them later if you’re not getting the mesh to deform as it should, but try to get as close as you can.
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Once I get all the bones set, I select and duplicate all the “L” bones, then mirror them to the right side using X Global. Sometimes, after you mirror them, the bone rolls appear to not be lined up correctly. Not sure the easiest way to fix it, but I just usually reset each bone using CTRL+n and selecting the Z-axis. Sometimes this doesn’t work correctly, so this is where my inexperience comes in. Not sure how to fix things like the thumb correctly, but I just manually dial in the roll on those bones using the N-panel.
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Some people like to set up IK, poles, etc. at this point, but I want to get the model deforming first, then go back and add the advanced things. If I’ve invested tons of time on the rig, then find out later that the model won’t deform properly without major adjustments to the mesh, then I’ve wasted a bunch of effort. Most of the time, I can make minor adjustments to the mesh after it’s rigged, so this usually isn’t a problem.
IMPORTANT: Save the file! I’ll usually make a new version that I can go back to if I really mess things up and keep it “clean” (no weight maps, parenting, etc.).
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Go to pose mode on the rig, select the mesh, shift-select a bone on the rig, then parent the rig (CTRL+P) and select “With Automatic Weights”. If this works pretty well or if only some sections are all hosed up, I’ll save this as a new file and then go about fixing the weights. If it’s a complete mess with the auto-weighting, I’ll re-open the “clean” file and and parent using “With Empty Groups” to get all the vertex groups in there without any weights applied. There’s almost no way around fixing the weighting unless you have a fairly simple model that deforms the way you want, so roll up your sleeves and just start weight painting.
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Test the deformations. The key areas to look at are the armpit, upper thigh/hip area, and the head/neck. I’ll put the model into an extreme pose to see if there are any areas that need work, go into weight paint mode, then I’ll use the add/subtract brushes to fix things. A little trick that works well is to bend something on the left side, right click on the corresponding bone on the right side, and with x-mirror on in the options panel, paint the weights and watch what happens on the bent side. Sometimes it’s hard to get into the little nooks and crannys on a bent area, so this works will to fix the weights without posing/unposing all the time. One area that you’ll need to watch out for is the inner mouth (if you have one) and teeth/tongue. What I do is move the head into an extreme pose and see if any verticies are left behind. This is common due to the way the auto-weighting does things, so it’s only a matter of setting your add brush to 1.00 strength and 1.00 weight and click on the problem verts. I make sure the entire head is a solid red down to the top of the neck. If you make a lower jaw bone, you can always have a separate vertex group for that, so don’t worry about including the jaw in the head weight.
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Sometimes I just can’t fix an area, most notably the fingers, which can really get some bad auto-weighting, so I’ll remove all the weighting using the vertex groups panel. Then I’ll select the vertices and assign weights with 1.0 dialed in. For the fingers especially, this works well, but some areas will have to be smoothed out with gradual weighting. You can actually do all the weight painting using the vertex groups panel and selecting verticies in edit mode, but I don’t recommend doing the whole model this way since you can’t see the actual weights. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, you’ll have to find a good tutorial – it’s tedious and I won’t get into it.
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Once I get all the deformations working nicely, I’ll start adding things to the rig, like IK arms and legs, a single controller for all the fingers, an eye rig, pole targets for the arms & legs, etc. I haven’t created a full face rig yet, so I guess that’s the next thing I have to do. The point is to add to the rig a piece at a time rather than do everything at once.
This works well for me, but I’m sure other people like to do things differently.
Sorry to be so long-winded here, but I hope this helps.
Interesting note about the foot rig. I’ve never rigged a single-mesh character with Rigify, just my ball characters and they all have discrete parts for foot, toe, shin, etc. (even the joints of their fingers) so I just do Set Parent To > Bone. This was my way of avoiding weight-painting. Since these characters are toys come to life with their joints based roughly on a G.I. Joe I had as a kid, it’s good enough.
Another way you can do this is to leave the Meta-rig intact and turn on Armature Options > X Axis Mirror in the Tools sidebar window. It would save you some steps if nothing else.
As for rolling bones, I’ve never bothered with the Ctrl-n thing. If you move joints around using just the manipulator (as opposed to ‘g’ and free-form moving things) roll is much easier to control. If you go to the Properties window > Armature tab > Display and turn on Axis you can see how the bone roll is looking as you go. The rule of thumb for thumbs (if you’ll forgive the pun) is to sight down the thumb from the tip to the base and adjust the roll until the z-axis is pointing in the direction the thumb would curl. Same for all the fingers, really, but with fingers, it’s usually easier to find a vantage point from which to do it.
Yes, good idea to save several versions as you go. I came up with a date-time naming convention I use for everything now: <object name><year><month><day><hour>-<minute>. With <hour> I use the 24-hour clock and <year> is always four digits. That way, the history of the file is automatically in chronological order in whatever folder it’s in. When the older files get to be a pain, I move most of them into a sub-folder called History or just zip them up and back them up onto a spare drive.
Yes, I’ve read lots of complaints about weight-painting fingers. It’s not just in Blender that a lot of work needs to go into this step.
Thanks for adding your comments. Good information.
I’ll throw in 2 bits here also…
@ Safetyman… nice work flows… Thanks for the share…
One thing that really started nailing down Rigging for me was understanding that Rigging is a ‘Big’ deal… it’s not a small thing… if your talking about using 3D for animation it’s a Big part of the whole… you can’t really ignore it… it won’t go away… it’s better if you simply embrace it and understand that the study of Anotomy and motion should be on your agenda as a Human figure Artist anyway… it’s like hating to clean your brushes when your learning to paint… don’t do it and it cost you a million in Brushes…
So understanding that… Yes… it’s a big tedious job… and Big Tedious Jobs need to be broken down into smaller pieces… I hightly recomend for anyone the Nathan Vegdahl Humane Rigging DVD… (even though someone has already commented on it above) this is an excellent ‘Learning to Rigg’ DVD … better than any I have seen in a long time… (anyway…)
Breaking the Big Job down into parts…
First… make a Deformation Rigg… and save it…
that is a Rigg that only has the basic Bones… with the proper Bone names… This Rigg will be the one you build your Final Rigg on top of … but you want this one saved so that you can always come back to it…
The Deformation Rigg has NO IK or Constraints on it… it is only the bones for doing Deformation…
It is at this early stage that you work out all your weight painting…
You might even throw in some extra bones at this point to help deform the Rigg to reduce weight painting…
Bones are inexpesive in terms of render and CPU process time you can have a lot of bones in a Rigg before it will start to slow things up… (not that you can’t get too crazy with it but…)
Also you may find that you need ot readjust some of the Mesh topology so that it deforms better…
better to do that at the early stages of Rigg Creation than to wait unitl you have a fully constructed Rigg and then find out that your Mesh just simply won’t work with it…
So create the Deformation Rigg and do the Weight painting early …
way before you start doing IK and Constraint setups on your Rigg…
In the end it saves time and frustration…
Nathan in his Hot Dog guy tutorial in the “humane Rigging DVD” demostrates this a bit…
anyway …
the more of this kind of thing you do the less weight painting and corrective shapkeying you will have to do…
which really is where Rigging gets painfull…
You will always have to do a some weight painting and a shape keys here and there…
I have a few Riggs that have no shape keys at all…
so there are ways to make it work smoother…
I can only say just keep messing with it and you will catch on …
we all had to drag ourselves through it one pain in the ass at a time…
so we know what your going through…
Just don’t give up on it… it will come… and when it does you will be glad you did it…
even still …
we all have our talents… so… don’t worry about it if it’s not your thing… no biggee…
Good comments Norv. I used to hate rigging, and to some extent I still do, but I really love the end result, and nothing is more satisfying than finishing the rig and watching that thing move your character around. It’s tedious, time-consuming, cuss-inducing work, but it will actually teach you a lot about how to create good topology in your characters. You can have the best looking model ever created, but if you want to animate it or just pose it, you must have good poly flow.
One more thing about Rigify – it will save you a lot of time with getting a character set up, but unless you know what all the little constraints and parts are for, you will be banging your head against the wall. That’s why I suggested starting with a simple rig from scratch – you may not need everything that Rigify throws in there. You can always add to your simple rig as needed.
Gotta agree with you on this one.
Would you mind giving a bit more specifics about that? The intent of Rigify is to be very general-purpose, so cases where it fails to deliver good results is important for me to know!
One thing to keep in mind is that the placement and alignment of bones/joints is critical to the result turning out well. One of the reasons I created Rigify, actually, was to make it easy to play with and test joint placements for good deformations. All you have to do is adjust the joints and hit “generate”, instead of having to adjust five bones and hope their alignment still works properly…
Before you start willy-nilly rigify-ing a bunch of characters, I’d suggest rigging some yourself from scratch to understand weight painting, how IK works, what the constraints do, etc.
Dunno. Another reason I created Rigify was to allow people to rig characters well without having to understand the nitty-gritty of constraints, drivers, rig constructions, etc.
Also, just to note, Rigify doesn’t do weighting. So you need to learn that anyway, even if you’re using Rigify. Some people are under the mis-impression that Blender’s auto-weighting feature is part of Rigify, but it’s actually completely unrelated, and often gives poor results (although it can be a useful starting point).
Yeah, I see this alot too, and I suspect that this is what is happening here.
Skinning a mesh to a rig is really a completely separate area than making the control rig anyway. For a good tutorial on skinning/deformations, I’d recommend Cessen/ Nathan’s mammoth rigging tutorial on CmiVFX.
Personally, when I do weight painting etc, I leave the mirror modifier unapplied, if its before the armature modifier on the stack, it should correctly mirror weights to the opposite groups. I’ve had some odd problems at times with blender’s weight mirroring tools.
The other thing, which Cessen does in his tutorial, is to edit the weights manually in edit mode (select verticies, in the ‘n’/properties panel you can see what weights are assigned). This gives you much more control over fiddly areas than weight painting.
Nathan! The Master!
I guess I was being a bit harsh with Rigify – not my intent. You’re right about the weight painting thing, I grouped that part of it with Rigify, which is my mistake. I should have said that auto-weighting gives mixed results… Geez, it sounds like I totally nixed Rigify. I apologize.
Rigify was one of the reasons why I switched to Blender for rigging my characters in the first place. However, I’m on a custom-rig kick lately and I must admit that I’ve learned quite a lot doing it from scratch – not that I’m any good at it, just that I can see what’s happening a lot better. Maybe now that I know my way around better I’ll try more with Rigify. Forgive my newbness.
That workflow is actually outdated now. It’s still worth learning, I guess, but a couple new weighting features that were added in the 2012 (or 2011? I can’t remember) SoC provide a much, much better workflow. I’ll be covering that on my next rigging DVD, whenever I get around to it.
The other thing, which Cessen does in his tutorial, is to edit the weights manually in edit mode (select verticies, in the ‘n’/properties panel you can see what weights are assigned). This gives you much more control over fiddly areas than weight painting.
This, specifically, is what’s no longer true. There are still times that I go into edit mode for weighting, but I now spend most of my time in weight painting mode, and it gives me plenty of control. The feature that really made this feasible is the vertex group lock (the little lock icon that appears next to each VG now). I treat weight painting more as “weight flow” now. I only ever have two VG’s unlocked at a time, and I treat weight painting as a way to flow weights between them.
Anyway, I don’t mean to knock your advice! Just providing updated info is all. Thanks for speaking up.
Woah, woah, woah! No need to apologize. I was just clarifying, is all. I’m always happy to get constructive critiques of Rigify, especially when accompanied by a clear use-case that isn’t being satisfied. I mean, Rigify has some inherent limitations in its design that I doubt will change, but within those limitations I want it to be as good as possible.
However, I’m on a custom-rig kick lately and I must admit that I’ve learned quite a lot doing it from scratch
Oh yes, absolutely. I didn’t mean to knock rigging things by hand. Rather, I was trying to point out that for people who don’t care to learn the nitty-gritty of rigging, I don’t think they should necessarily have to. And that’s one of the goals of Rigify, is to help such people produce good rigs.
But for people who really want to dive into rigging and learn all the nitty-gritty and how to design and create their own custom rigs, there’s only one way to do that: get your hands dirty. (And buy Humane Rigging. ;-))
cool to know, I’ll have to play around with those tools now.
This, specifically, is what’s no longer true. There are still times that I go into edit mode for weighting, but I now spend most of my time in weight painting mode, and it gives me plenty of control. The feature that really made this feasible is the vertex group lock (the little lock icon that appears next to each VG now). I treat weight painting more as “weight flow” now. I only ever have two VG’s unlocked at a time, and I treat weight painting as a way to flow weights between them.
Thanks for the share on this… I have been struggling with Weight painting and not been very satisfied with it’s use… as a result I have made quite a bit of head way by kind of forcing Automatic weigths to work for me… by adding in extra bones in places where AW gets confused as to what should go where… in the end I still end up doing weights… but I have been doing them lately as you did them with Mr. HotDog in Humane Rigging DVD… but The vast majority of my weighting has been working great by using extra bones and AW… I origonaly intended that I would put those bones in the Rigg… then Auto Weigh… then use them only as Vertex Group place holders… that is I would use the AW create the groups weight them out… then it would be easily Selected in the Vertex Group panel and I could then Reasign them to another Group… Collecting the helper bone groups into larger Groups then deleting them out of the Rigg… but I ended up leaving them in the Riggs thus far… as the don’t seem to slow things down much… of coarse I realise this is bad practice as every little bit helps as your scene files get bigger and with more characters… and I suppose the Automatic weights is something I haven’t seen in other software… at least not as nicely implimented as in Blender so I have been having fun making use of it…
Also on the idea of having Prebuilt Riggs… I have used many in times past… (in other softwares… XSI… Lightwave…) and always found them to be frustrating to use… they never seemed to do what I wanted them to or if they did… there were no clear explainations as to how to access their use… So I’ve learned Rigging in many software platforms both out of interest and out of necessity…
At the same time… the whole purpose of computing is to make things easier… so I’m all for an Auto Rigg… Rigify… Bone Zipper deal… keep up the good work felas… but realize some of us just like taking things appart and putting them back together in ways no one intended for them to go…