Today, the video documentation (some might call it a tutorial) for the Studio's rigging tool is released!

What is CloudRig?

It is a so-called "feature set" of the Rigify Blender add-on, and it extends Rigify with tons of extra features. This series is not quite a step-by-step guide to work towards a big goal like rigging a character - for that content, check out my live streams! Instead, it's more of an overview of all the features that are available. It is meant as a companion for the Wiki, and to help you figure out how to generate a rig that behaves exactly how you want it. From there, actually weight painting your character, dealing with meshes, their modifiers and deformations, is not going to be in focus here.

Some History

This feature set has been in development since the early days of Coffee Run, and was used to rig all the characters on that film except for the main character, Hail, who is a modified version of Rain. Rain/Hail was the last character to have been rigged "manually" (bone by bone) at the Studio, but in fact, Rain's spine rig was generated by a few dozen lines of code which was later used for CloudRig's spine generator.

With Settlers, we then explored a totally different style, which required a lot more curve-based rigs, and a lot more minor tweaks and very specific behaviours, so CloudRig got some curve based rig generators and the ability to tweak individual bones, even if at the cost of things getting a bit messy.

And then of course finally, came Sprite Fright, with its rubber hose animation and crazy deformation that could only be handled by sprinkling in some Lattice-based rig elements.

What's next?

There are still a few videos coming, particularly when it comes to face rigging. These are on the horizon, but first, I would like to rig Snow's face on the Blender Studio Livestream. With the help of the community, I will gather ideas on what people want to know, so I know how to structure the videos. Ring that bell if you don't want to miss the live streams!

While rigging Snow, I also started implementing a new spine rig type, which is still in the experimental stages. Once that's polished, I will add a video about that too, so keep an eye out!