Brilliant stuff.
Been playing around with driving a rigify generated rig with bvh files which gives me a suggestion for rigify.
Have an action attached to the generating rig with a number of common rest pose positions like star and Tpose. A UI could be set up to select the one you wish to start from…or choose one as a default. This is no “biggy” as it’s not the hardest thing in the world to edit the rig to fit, however if all your characters are already in TPose it does save a bit of time.
If that’s the base pose the an action won’t cut it. Base pose needs to be set in edit mode not pose!
Luckily you can save the metarig and just append it into scenes… that way if , say, you are making a film about flying monkeys then you can set up a metarig with bent legs in horse riding stance with longer arms, a tail and wings and just append it for each and every monkey…
Or in your case make a tpose meta rig, a spreadeagle meta rig etc etc…
The biped meta rig that you add from the add menu is just a starter for common use.
Oh come on mate, I understand this Michael… It’s one click, or easy to script, to set it as the rest pose. They are after all just changes in poses, not structure, of the meta rig.
The biped meta rig that you add from the add menu is just a starter for common use.
I agree it’s a starter. tpose and spreadeagle are common too. For a noob editing rig from a tpose start to a tpose mesh creates less opportunity to stuff up.
I didn’t read all 16 pages yet, but I am building some rigs from scratch and finding out that they all (even older rig from say… 2.54 that I reopen and save) have a custom property in the custom properties option under the Armature tab. This custom property adds another field where you can name your layers.
I understand why this can be useful, but does that mean every rig gets rigify parts? What if I don’t need or want that?
The whole point of Rigify is to automatically create “rigify parts”. If you don’t want to use rigify, just ignore the extra possible controls (or disable the Rigify add-on, from whence the UI elements are from).
I could do this, but it is not something I would find personally useful, nor do I think it would be particularly useful to most users. If you have a different rest pose that your models are more frequently in, you can simply create your own metarig that starts in roughly that pose and append as Michael notes.
The point of the default human metarig is not to be the metarig that everyone is supposed to start from. It is only one possible configuration, and is merely supposed to cover one common case: a basic humanoid character in t-pose. You can create your own metarigs to cover other cases like quadrupeds, crazy four-armed monsters, etc. with whatever default pose you like. And you are more than welcome to submit them to me if you like, and I may add them to the menu if I think they are unique and commonly-useful enough to be put there (I do intend to add more metarigs there over time, for e.g. quadruped, bird, etc.).
Lastly, since you mentioned bvh, I just want to note that Rigify is targeted at creating rigs for manual keyframe animation, not mocap. Its purpose may expand in the future, but for now the focus is narrow. Mocap rigs have different requirements than manual keyframe rigs.
@thelowlander:
As BTolputt notes, if you do not wish to use the Rigify addon, then simply disable it. Even with it enabled you can just construct rigs normally and ignore Rigify, but it will indeed append some (inert and harmless) data to the armature. Disable the addon before constructing your rig if that data bothers you.
IF the answer has already been given, please forgive me but I didn’t want to wade through 16 pages of posts. I did a thread search for ‘foot’ but didn’t find the same problem.
I have the current linux-2.59-glibc-2.7. If I start new and add an armature, move it to the side and then generate the rig the foot IK is not working. everything else seems to be working. There is set of MCH bones (yellow)that seem to be working correctly but the DEF(orm) bones (blue) are not following. Any ideas what’s wrong?
bobg, try turning IK on:
Cessen, I am listening to the Blender Podcast with you right now. Maybe it is interesting for you to hear that there is a thing named Rigify to Unity. It gets downloaded about 100-150 times per month from the Unity Asset Store. Even if it is freely available, you may expect there are quite some people using Rigify for games.
Really great addon.
I am just starting to learn how to modify Rigify UI panel python script.
Would it be hard to make a python script which does this?
Actualy yes, I did all the ajustments in edit mode from very begining. Then hit generate and genated rig is uber tiny and things like arms are not quite where the rig I did ajustments are. Few other lil things like that.
@JiriH:
I do not intend to add that as a feature, no. It would not be difficult to write that as a separate addon, though, that generically handles armatures in pose mode.
@Furlow:
If you have any object-level scaling, translation, or rotation on the metarig, then the rig will not generate in the same place, and it is not a bug. Please check to make sure that is not the case.
If, however, you are still getting strange results even after location, rotation, and scale are all cleared on the metarig, then please post an example blend file with the problem so I can hunt down the bug.
Thanks!
Just wanted to say, “Great job!” on this plugin. This system is so much easier to use than the rigs I was building from scratch! Not sure how much that says (maybe I just suck) but I’ve found using these rigs to be a real joy. Keep it up!
I just tried this addon today, and wow, it’s so nice, especially in combination with the automatic weighting. I know there was talk of a face rig, which personally I feel may be kind of tough to do given the variety of character concepts, but has there been much thought to adding eye controls, and maybe a jaw one as well? Do you see what happens, once you make someone a little lazy, they become really lazy! Seriously though, rigify is awesome.
I have began studying animation using Tony Mullen’s book so I am using rigify to rig my character. I was working with it yesterday and I didn’t run into any issues with the finger scaling, I am using the official 2.61 release.
I found out that it is very likely one (or more) addons (as i use several of them that are not enabled by default) that is responsible of this bug, i disabled every addons i used and the Rigify finger controllers works.
Now trying to track what is/are the addon(s) responsible of this.
EDIT :
So after disabling all my addons and only having Rigify enabled, i could make it work as i said.
Then to try to track which addon was responsible, i enabled one by one my addon, each time adding a Human Rig and generating a Rigify to test the finger controller, and everytime it worked.
And so after enabling all the addons i use to have in my “default” setup, Rigify finger controller is always working as it should …
It does not make any sense as there’s now nothing different from when the finger controller wasn’t working as shown in my screenshots up there.
doesn’t work so well for models with overlapping geometry 
(like clothing)
nor does any other method of rigging I have found 
Create a mesh deform box, deform the cage with the armature… the cage should deform the meshes without intersections
…awesome. I’ll try that right now
I used makehuman mesh and blender metarig and generated the rig using rigify, While parenting the mesh with rig(Automatic weight):rolleyes: , blender displays the error message as " Bone heat weighting: Failed to find solutions to one or more bones". I am unable to find out the problems. I am using Ubuntu OS latest version and Blender 2.61. But irrespective of blender version, I am getting this error message. I request help from you all blender experts. Thanks
Rangan