Blender Institute Podcast #008 - BlenRig

Hi guys, Great podcast!

A few corrections regarding Rigify:

• The philosophy of Rigify is to automate the parts of rigging that don't require any artistic input. Or, in other words, it's meant as a tool to speed up manual rigging, rather than as a full auto-rigging solution. The original motivation was suffering through setting up all the bones and constraints for the fingers of all the characters in BBB: it was obvious that the process could be automated, and the process of setting those up involved no artistic decisions that might vary from character to character.
• With that in mind, Rigify is designed as a library of "rig parts" (fingers, arms, legs, spines, etc.) that can be plugged together in arbitrary ways. So, for example, you can create a creature with 8 fingers coming off its elbows and 6 legs (one of which sprouts from the head) if you like. A lot of people don't realize this, and just use the default biped metarig. (Admittedly, biped is the most common use-case.)
• From what I gather, BlenRig is aimed at nearly fully automating the rigging process of a humanoid character.
• Flex Rig is not based on Rigify in any technological sense. It uses the same control scheme (roughly) as the default Rigify biped rig, but it was manually rigged and doesn't share any code with Rigify (at least, not that I can recall).

I think all three of these projects (BlenRig, Rigify, Flex Rig) are useful, and to some extent orthogonal in purpose. BlenRig is what I think most people want Rigify to be: a fully automated rigging solution for typical characters. Rigify (in reality) is a tool for speeding up the manual rigging process. Flex Rig is for animators who just want a quick character to animate with.

Anyway, great podcast! I really enjoyed listening, and I'm very excited to see what people do with BlenRig! It's an awesome project!

Ctrl Shift V, on the viewport in pose mode, pasting inverted pose is really one thing that sold to me the animation tools in blender, and then also Shift E, when i figured the breakdowner, oh my!!!, amazing shit.

My favourite Blender shortcut is Ctrl Shift C: Add Constraints with targets. It makes rigging very fast compared with other softwares :) In the other hand we have a most hated shortcut: Ctrl Shift Alt C. It took like forever for my team to memorize that, it was like "How was the shortcut to Set Origin of an object?" and "Really? Ctrl, Shift AND Alt?" again and again xD

Hi, here are a lot of other questions for the next few episodes: What do you do after Caminandes 3 is released? What was the craziest thing you have done with blender? Have you used blender before a sense it was NOT designed for, but it worked beautifully for your need? If you have all the resources you would need: What area of blender would you like to improve? If you only have one minute, how would you describe Blender 3d to a person not knowing anything about CG? Thanks, Roman

I didn't heard you discuss it in the last episodes, so I hope it is not too late: My favourite hotkey is Shift Ctrl Alt M to select the non manifold vertices. I use it a lot for 3D-printing. I like it because I remember it so well! I don't have to remember: Is it Alt M, Ctrl or Shift M? It is all of the above combined!

Just wanted to ask you this.. How much code-friendly are you guys??

Do you guys make and use small snippets of code here and there for daily work??

I mean we know Pablo can code...What about the others??

Animation is changing, more young women are getting into animation college and doing really well. I had the pleasure to hire a team recently, and 90% of the applicants i got were young women, so the team was 90% female since then its evened out.

Personally I don't like it when teams go too male or too female as it gets too political or too macho. you want a nice mix. On Quota's I'd say that I get the idea but I think that long term it will perpetualise the idea that women cant manage without help.. which is total trash.

Really enjoying the podcast, keep up the good work :)

Animation Mentor has been mentioned a couple of times in these podcasts, it's no doubt a great course for learning animation. With the very talented animators that the Blender Institute has working on the open projects, are there any plans for an animation course similar to what Animation Mentor provides?

H, the Blenrig system looks great, It's awsome to have an updated rigging system finally, I wanted to ask if a quadruped preset is coming soon, I've been wishing for a quad rigify for ages!