CloudRig is our homebrewed rigging tool which garnered some recognition over the years. Since 2020, we've used and evolved this tool on the open movies CoffeeRun, Sprite Fright Wing It!, and plenty more. While developing it, I took inspiration from other tools like Rigify, BlenRig, RigUI, ActionMan, and maybe others I forget.

The People

I always encourage users to share their projects with me if they've used CloudRig to realize it. And some of them have! In this article, I catch up with these users, as pretty much all of them actually got back to me when I got in touch, which is incredible! Let me start by introducing them, and showcasing their projects where possible!

Despair

It took me only a few seconds to feel the influence of legendary animator Monty Oum in this brutal (yet somehow cute) trailer for a series called "Mana Seizure". This trailer was created single-handedly in about 2 years by Despair (@CLOCK-WURM). I'd love to see more stuff like this!

Warning: Cartoon violence, lots of blood! :D

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Jack "STANN.co" Conradsen

I've been listening to Camellia since discovering his music through Beat Saber in 2018, so when I realized that STANN.co used CloudRig for one of his music videos, I was floored. Made in just 2 months and rendered with GooEngine, the visuals are just as bouncy and energetic as the music.

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Abaasa Joe Taga

From far away Uganda, Joe at Creatures Animation Studio used CloudRig for this cute kid's series of fun and educational music videos. Their team of 12 artists had about 2 weeks to create each 2-5 minute episode.

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Leander Silur

Leander decided to use CloudRig to rig the characters in 1, 2, 3 15-second social media ads which they've created at BitteschönTV. It took him only 2-3 days to rig them, besides minor tweaks down the line. I for one appreciate a nice, high-effort ad, and appealing animation is definitely a good way to get my attention!

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Nicholas Danks

Nicholas at Lung Animation is part of a team of 11 (give or take) artists who were commissioned to bring this 16 minute Christmas special full of fun character designs and high quality animation, from animatic to its full final 3D glory.

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Eli Rabinovich

Eli as part of a team of 6 at FridayLab is currently working on an awesome 3-minute short codenamed "Bad Apple", which has a surprisingly serious theme despite its goofy visuals! They showed it to me at this year's Blender Conference and I really loved it, and can't wait for the final product! I'll be following their progress on their instagram.

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Thalia Solari

Thalia Solari has given me incredibly valuable live feedback as I was developing the Properties UI editing system, while they were working on rigs of their own characters.

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Dzooworks

Search his name at your own peril, Dzooworks is a talented creator of adult rigs and animations, of which I'm certainly a big fan. He has reported many many bugs to me via chat, helping me polish CloudRig. Maybe I even directly helped out on one of his saucy rigs, who knows? That's between me and the Lord above. :)

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Fulcrum

Fulcrum is working on a shortfilm for their portfolio, about a deep-sea explorer encountering bioluminescent creatures. They used CloudRig for the main character, and they're the only person I know who used CloudRig's physics chain rig component! :)

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The good, the bad, and the CloudRig

There were a number of topics I wanted to ask each of them about! I was curious to see what they liked or disliked about their experiences with CloudRig, and what features it might be missing. All the quotes are paraphrased for brevity.

What was your rigging experience before using CloudRig for the first time?

Despair: "I've done minor tweaks on game rigs, and in this dance-off animation, I rigged the robot from scratch, and the guy using Rigify."

STANN.co: "I used Rigify for a few years, but couldn't make custom UI elements without knowing python scripting, and making tweaks and face controls was difficult. Then I found CloudRig hidden away on the blender Studio website, and it was a great resource."

Leander: "Manual rigging in Blender and Maya. I don't know any advanced facial rigs. I previously scripted repetitive setups (e.g. tentacles) manually."

Nicholas: "We were mainly doing rigging in Maya before our move over to Blender. Nothing crazy though, mainly auto rigging and a few custom rigs here and there."

Eli: "Back in the day we learned Maya's "Advanced Skeleton", then built up experience with Blender through rigging for mobile games, using video courses, and by manually rigging our first studio short, Overreaction. We shared the rigs for the community as well :)"

Thalia Solari: "I used Rigify before the improvements to the face rig and was unsatisfied with it for cartoony characters. I also used Faceit to do a full shape key face rig, but that was too difficult to manage for multiple characters. Moved back to Rigify after the facial improvements but it just didn't click with me. Tested BlenRig, really good but didn't like the weighting workflow and it felt too tailored towards realism. Facial actions and fleshy mouth rig seemed like a good idea to build off of, and CloudRig caught my eye."

Dzooworks: "I first rigged characters with basic armatures which I would export to Source Filmmaker. I eventually became interested in creating a character rig to be used directly in Blender. I learned the basics from some tutorials, but the whole process felt very time consuming. Time I'd rather spend creating characters! That’s when I discovered Cloudrig, which offered videos and downloadable examples. After using it for a while, I can confidently say that it made rigging genuinely fun!"

Fulcrum: "Before CloudRig, I'd been rigging in Blender for about 3 years. Mostly self-taught through tutorials and trial-and-error. It felt extremely intuitive moving from Rigify over to CloudRig."

Did you use the wiki, the course, the livestreams, or something else to learn how to use CloudRig?

Despair: "All three! Watched the whole course when planning out Mana Seizure. I also watched the livestreams and read through the wiki, and referred back to those regularly. I built a prototype character, and reused the metarig and base meshes from it as the basis for the two character rigs. I love a well-maintained wiki for quick reference, and being able to see a whole real world workflow (at 2x speed) like in the livestreams is the easiest way for me to learn a new tool. I thought the resources for CloudRig were excellent."

STANN.co: "The course, and later by DMing you to ask about some intricacies which were unclear or undocumented."

Joe Taga: "I used every available resource, starting with YouTube livestreams, then moving on to the Blender Studio course, the documentation, and even dissecting downloaded rigs to learn directly from the source."

Leander: "The wiki and trial and error. I don't think I've learnt it, I probably less than 20% of the features."

Nicholas: "The courses on the website as well as the wiki were my best friend when it came to the learning experience. I refer back to the wiki quite often. The livestreams were great to learn the general workflow and some streamlining tips in general."

Eli: "We used the wiki a lot, and spent time with you on the livestreams, sometimes watched them more than once. Usually the documentation was enough, but there were some cases where we couldn't find what we were looking for, although I can't remember a good example right now. Switching from Rigify to CloudRig is pretty easy and the keyboard shortcuts made our life so much easier."

Thalia Solari: "Most of my learning was experimenting on my own, iterating on my first character rig, but I did use the wiki where I could. The wiki was more of a "how thing works" information source though rather than how to actually create a workflow and use everything in tandem. I studied the Coffee Run and Sprite Fright characters to try and discern the best workflow."

Dzooworks: "I mostly used the wiki. I would also watch the livestream recordings if I was looking for specific details. The topics are neatly separated into different videos, so I can jump directly to the parts I want to learn more about. I feel like the current resources are great!"

Fulcrum: "I actually started with the livestreams! They were super helpful for seeing real-world problem-solving and it's definitely my preferred learning style. I would love to see more in depth streams like this from the Blender Studio team! The wiki became my go-to reference later, but those initial streams really helped me understand the workflow as a whole and get a good understanding of intended use. Though I'll admit there were moments where I wished the wiki had more examples for some of the advanced features."

Did you run into any struggles, surprises, bugs, etc while rigging? Were you able to work around them?

Despair: "At one point I updated CloudRig and the Action Slots started throwing errors because some used the same action, so I had to roll back. I also wanted to keep my rotations on quaternions, but this wasn't supported by some of snapping and baking features. I managed to work around this by converting to Euler, then do the snap & bake, then convert back to Quaternions."

STANN.co: "I used and tested nearly every aspect of CloudRig while making the music video, and encountered a handful of bugs and issues. I reported them to you and most or all have been fixed through updates."

Joe Taga: "We ran into problems with the cloud_jaw componpent, but I found a workaround. We also ran into an issue where the post-generation script was failing, but we could just run it manually. Transitioning a project from 3.6 to 4.2 LTS had issues with the conversion from layers to collections, which contributed to our decision to stick to 3.6 for now."

Leander: "My custom widgets kept disappearing after each regeneration and I messaged you about it. In the end I used the custom shape options on tweak bones if I remember correctly. I was also unsure about how I could get the mouth spline to properly go around in a loop while using the mirror, so I used my own setup."

Nicholas: "The main struggles were adapting from Maya to Blender. Blender is quite different :) and their updates did, on occasion, cause some discomfort. With Blender updates, some things would break on CloudRig, but there was always a fix that allowed us to complete the project in time."

Eli: "Problem solving is part of what we do, so we managed to solve most of them... so far. 😅 But there's definitely a lack of CloudRig users who share their problems and solutions online."

Thalia Solari: "The biggest hurdle was creating IK spline controlled simulation rigs. I can't remember all the details, but the existing Physics Chain component didn't work the way I wanted it to, so I needed to hack around that with extra bones a post-generation script. This felt way too complicated for what it was. This was further complicated by non-CloudRig issues like running into dependency loops. I don't make controllable sim rigs anymore..."

Dzooworks: "I haven’t run into issues or crashes. Some other rig add-ons sometimes cause crashes on undo. I wish the Properties UI could have more than one operator per slider, and that there could be operators without a slider."

Fulcrum: "The biggest surprise was with the spine setup. I had a specific posing requirement for some of the deep-sea creatures where they needed to curl up into almost a ball shape. The default spine settings weren't quite giving me what I needed with the posing as extreme as it was. Took me a while to figure out the pivot behavior of the FK bones and to tweak the Bendy Bones in a way that gave me desirable results with the spine shortening along the longest axis. Once perfected, the end result was much more robust than the classic pivot behavior."

Do you have a favourite feature you would highlight?

Despair: "Action Slots for sure. Used them for slick hand grip and grip tilt controls for weapons, and for correctively adjusting armor and clothes bones automatically with the main pose bones. I also love the rig regeneration hot key for fast iteration.

STANN.co: "Creating custom UI sliders/toggles and buttons. For me it's a must-have for efficient animating."

Fun fact from Demeter: I developed this system in my free time because I didn't feel like it was justifiable to spend work time on it. At the time, I thought it could easily end up being a waste of time. It's nice to learn that it wasn't! :D

Joe Taga: "A couple favourite rig components of mine are Bone Tweak and Lattice. I also appreciate the Generation Log, and the overall ease of the system."

Leander: "The generation log is descriptive and understandable. Auto-Rig Pro didn't have good bendy limbs, so the ability to choose from CloudRig's two different modes for rubber hose limbs was a good fit. I could use the post-generation script to edit the property dictionary to expose some additional properties in the generated UI. That was pretty neat."

Nicholas: "We have a few favourites. The modular nature, cloud_curve, cloud_lattice, as well the nature in which it rigs bendy bones. Gotta love dem bendy bonez."

Eli: "The Shift+T and Ctrl+Alt+R shortcuts to switch between the metarig and generated rig, and to regenerate the rig. They're so useful and time saving because both of these actions you have to do so frequently. I also like the Advance Mode toggle that reveals extra customization options."

Thalia Solari: "Action slots. I liked that CloudRig didn't require me to create the UI using a script myself. The newer Custom UI stuff is great, but even the previous iteration was preferable to other add-ons I've tried. The Generation Log is also great, as it gives me actionable direction, tells me what's wrong outside of just generation failures. Helps with cleaning up stuff you can easily forget about."

Dzooworks: "The Generation Log. When working on a rig, there is always the possibility of user error, such as bones using the wrong display color, different Rotation Modes, etc. The Generation Log provides a list of warnings that the user can address (if they want to). It also offers steps to resolve these warnings with a few clicks. This ensures rigs are consistent!"

Did you/your animators find any aspect of the generated rigs confusing or unfamiliar?

Despair: "I've only ever used my own and Rigify rigs to animate, so they always made sense to me. When the CloudRig defaults or options didn't get me what I wanted, I could easily adjust them with the Bone Tweak component type and a post-generation script."

STANN.co: "As I both rigged AND animated the characters, I could quickly go fix up parts which needed improvement. The only limit for optimizing the rigs was my own time and effort."

Joe Taga: "Animators found the default layers for characters generated by the standard meta-rigs unintuitive, so we customized it to their needs. We also encountered bugs, for example one where procedural textures connected to curve meshes used by the Curve rig component were disappearing. Whenever we came across such problems, we would find a workaround."

Leander: "There wasn’t much difference to the rigs compared to rigs we use in other productions."

Nicholas: "YES! Obviously being accustomed to Maya, everyone was used to having contextually based properties on specific controls. CloudRig is generally all in one place which at times is nice, but can get a little busy trying to test what sliders do or where they are. But like most things, with time it becomes familiar."

Eli: "I have mixed thoughts about having all of the rig UI in a long side bar where everything is always visible, rather than having a smaller set of properties shown only based on what is selected. Our animator also wanted was a clear color separation between left and right sides, but setting this up took too much time so we kept it as it is."

Dzooworks: "I think the generated rigs are great for both advanced and new users! However, it would be great if Cloudrig could hide the bones that aren't currently usable, like in the case of IK/FK switches. I wrote a post-generation script to hide these bones while they are not used, but this would be difficult for users who hadn't made scripts before."

Note from Demeter: I put it on my TODO list to at least set up IK/FK bone collection visibility drivers in the shipped metarigs.

Did you run into any problems during animation? Can even mention non-CloudRig related ones.

Despair: "With CloudRig, I think the Spine IK was a little weird, but I just used the FK bones and that was fine. The FK hinge bones and eye master control had some weird scaling and flipping behaviors when the character's center of gravity control was rotated relative to the root bone too much. On the Blender side, I had major issues with Library Overrides corrupting shot files so they'd crash on start-up, and had to be re-built. NLA strips and constraints would have to be re-done, as they can't be appended. I never really understood why or when things would break."

STANN.co: "Blender and CloudRig undergoing changes definitely added complications to some projects. A big one being Bone Layers turning into Bone Collections, meant I had to save old versions of blender for certain projects. Re-generating rigs on newer versions could also result in some animation breakage, because of rig components changing their naming conventions for generated bones."

Note from Demeter: Here at the Studio we faced similar issues up until "Wing It!". Bastien ran to he rescue whenever we would discover new ways to break things. On Project Gold, I don't recall encountering any such issues anymore. I think the library override system is really robust now.

Joe Taga: "We ran into an issue with curve tilt being difficult to control, and some texture assignments to curves being lost, but these issues weren't CloudRig-specific, and we found workarounds."

Leander: "Parent switching and IK/FK baking was temporarily broken, but the shots were short so we could avoid baking and just switch manually. However, it was cool that scaling every part of the rig worked out of the box."

Nicholas: "Probably library overrides not behaving at times, as well as Blender's "not so animator friendly" constraint system."

Eli: "One of our animators said It was annoying that when you switch IK<->FK, the visibility of the Bone Collection isn't switching automatically too."

Did you combine CloudRig with any other tools in your character rigging workflow?

Despair: "I used your Easy Weight add-on and workflow, and Pose Shape Keys for the prototype character at least."

STANN.co: "No other rigging tools."

Joe Taga: "We’ve combined CloudRig with several other systems and tools, allowing us to confidently rig almost anything that comes our way."

Leander: "Yes, the spline components for the eyes and mouth didn't immediately work as expected. So I used my custom templates and fixed some things in the post-generation script, to combine them with CloudRig."

Nicholas: "Not really, pretty much CloudRig all the way."

Eli: "Before the introduction of Bone Collections in Blender 4.0, we used the Bone Manager add-on to create a Rig UI that looked a bit like Bone Collections."

Thalia Solari: "Not really. I've written scripts to aid in rigging efforts, but it's usually just simple stuff; Scripts to rename bones, reset stretch to constraints, bulk add constraints, and remove invalid drivers."

Dzooworks: "I used Auto-Rig Pro’s face template for the jaw and some of the face and eye bones. However, I also combined these bones with CloudRig Actions to control the positions of the bones for more accurate blinking and face bone transformations."

Think you will use CloudRig again?

Note: I didn't ask this question from Dzooworks and Thalia Solari since I know they're still using CloudRig.

Despair: "Absolutely! I even used CloudRig for the sword smear/flash and blood squirts FX too. Even the Bone Copy component takes care of some tedious bone naming, duplicating, and parenting for basic mechanisms. It's so useful and fast."

STANN.co: "Definitely. I still see CloudRig as my personal best option."

Joe Taga: "I think of CloudRig as a part of my toolbelt now, never leave home without it. I'm grateful for the work you continuously put in to make these tools available and improve the lives of artists globally."

Leander: "Definitely. It seems to be suited well for multiple similar characters or non-humanoid faces. For some of our extremely tight projects, where we need to start animating a few minutes after getting supplied with the character, I will prefer Auto-Rig Pro for now. The automatic joint placement of AutoRigPro and the voxelized weight generation is invaluable. (For humanoids.)"

Nicholas: "Only if you pay us 1 million dollars! Kidding, yeah it’s great, just don't f@#k it up."

Note from Demeter: Trying, but no promises!

Eli: "Probably yes."

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Future of CloudRig

I know CloudRig is incomplete. No animal metarigs, no human face preset, no mocap or lipsync features, and that's not even mentioning all the things that were mentioned above, which I have now also put on my long TODO list. CloudRig doesn't have to solve every rigging problem under the sun, but it's always good to cover more ground, and seeing one's tools being used on a wider range of projects is always fun.

As long as I'm working as a rigger, I intend to keep fixing bugs (as long as people report them!). I also want to occasionally add more features and systems, but that requires long stretches of dedicated time - which is difficult to find.

CloudRig will remain an extension, since adding it to core Blender would bring only downsides, mainly by tying me to a 4-monthly release schedule, which wouldn't make any sense for CloudRig.
Contributors would be seriously welcome! :) If you'd like to contribute, get in contact! (Email, Blender Chat)

Thank you!

A big thanks to everyone who contributed to this article, with their time, thoughts, feedback, and going out of their way to provide me with some fun visuals!

I feel like I've learned a lot from these conversations, and it's awesome to see how people have figured out features that I thought would be obscure, unnecessary, or unwieldy. I got some great feedback as well, and of course just seeing all these projects brings much joy.

Let's do this again in a few years! :D If you use CloudRig for a project, I'm always happy to hear and chat about it, and even help out if I can!