Hi,
I’m relatively new to rigging and animation in blender, and have been trying to use the rigify addon to generate a rig using a wolf metarig. The result seems okay for the most part, but I’ve run into a problem area and I’m not sure how to fix it. When I try moving the chest bone around the head stays in place and causes the neck to get stretched/messed up and the head ends up in a weird position.
I’ve tried to go into weight paint mode to look for problems, but haven’t found anything that seems wrong with the weights.
Does anyone have any advice on what I can try, or have experienced something similar with rigify?
this is made on purpose. animals and humans naturally stabilize their head when they’re walking, running and basically everything else. so the rig is set up to preserve head orientation when you move the chest. otherwise you’d have to counter-animate the head to stay in place quite often.
Though in the torso bone proporties, you have a “head follow” option that allows you to use the head as a basic Fk chain.
the “weird” deformations are due to something else that I personally find weirdly set-up. (anyway that’s kinda obvious that you have some not-so-compatible behaviours for some models with autorigs)
If you search for the “MCH-pivot” bone, you can replace the “copy transforms” constraint with a “copy location”. constraint. still with 0.5 influence and world space. and same target. and disable the copy transform. To me it works better.
Thanks bourdul. The copy transform on mch-pivot did improve the way it looks overall, and the torso bone properties for head/neck follow do too. Did not know about those options for torso in bone properties.
the “weird” deformations are due to something else that I personally find weirdly set-up
I see similar results when I tried working with a different model, though maybe they are similar in that sense.
Are you referring to the metarig used to generate the rigify one? I’ve been setting things up as shown in this tutorial, up to the part where the rig is generated and parented.
Edit: actually I did not set the rig’s origin to center of geometry, I used world origin.
My metarig for reference. The original wolf armature needed to be modified in edit mode to make things line up, though my understanding is that if the bones “look right” on the mesh things should be mostly fine.
