Snow & Rain Updated
- Update
- 14 Nov 2024
- 3 min read
Rain's character rig was made all the way back in 2019, and Snow in not-so-recent 2022. As both Blender and CloudRig rapidly change, things can't always be versioned perfectly, plus, as I gain more experience, I might do things a bit differently over time as well. So, these old character rigs were in need of a facelift, and several users have been asking for it. These rigs should now work on versions 4.1 and greater.
Download
You can download them for free from our Character Library, they've been bumped to the top.
What's changed?
Bone Collections
Furthermore, a UI reminiscent of the old grid layout returns. This can even be customized if you have CloudRig installed.
You can also press Shift+M, just like in the old days, to bring up a pop-up panel of collections. But in this case, you will get the full nested list of collections, not the simple grid layout.
Snow's Metarig
Snow's metarig has been updated to the "new" standalone CloudRig extension, so it can be generated again, and it can be a useful resource to try and reverse engineer if you want to learn how to use CloudRig.
CloudRig UI
Rain wasn't rigged with CloudRig, since back in 2019 it didn't exist. However, she was eventually updated to use its rig script, providing functionality like IK/FK snapping and baking, which has also gotten more precise and reliable in newer versions. This relies on certain data being stored on the rig. With the recent improvements, the format of this data has completely changed. So, to make use of the improved functionality, I had to manually convert all her UI data, which is normally not really intended to be readable by humans, nevermind editable. But since I'm the one that implemented the data structure, I was able to do this with minimal hassle.
If you have CloudRig installed, this UI is also editable without any coding.
Bone Colors
I'm an advocate for removing custom bone colors from Blender, and instead improving the built-in base 20 color presets that exist, 5 of which are currently pure black and most of them too dark to be useful. For that reason, I've been using my own custom set of 20 color presets, which were designed here. These are now built into CloudRig. These rigs now use these colors, as a proof of concept. My hope is that this can contribute to or inspire improvements to the bone color system in core Blender.
Animation compatibility
I don't guarantee compatibility of old animations on the updated rigs, especially Snow. You can always try, but you're probably better off finishing old projects on the Blender version that you started on.
9 comments
I am a big fan of sprite fright, will ellie get an update?
@yujiaxin Possible, but no plans at the moment, sorry.
I need another rig live, rig live have more details than the lessens on blender studio. By the way, I wish I can use bones from rigfy together with cloudrig. The separation of rigfy and cloudrig is a sad thing to me. Maybe another master rigger can do this.
@yujiaxin Heya, I wouldn't mind hearing what aspects of Rigify you're missing from CloudRig if you could open an issue about it on CloudRig's repo, here: https://projects.blender.org/Mets/CloudRig/issues
I watched the video on youtube, happy to see rain in 4.2
"I'm an advocate for removing custom bone colors from Blender"
Yikes. I love custom bone colors. Please tell me you have zero say over this matter.
@0x777777 It depends! If people will just leave useless comments on unrelated articles, then yes, the final design will be largely influenced by me, since I'm one of the more vocal and active community members who cares about the topic. But, if people choose to read, and find the link to the public forum in the exact paragraph you quoted from, which directly discusses this piece of development with the actual developers, and god forbid choose to participate and share their thoughts, then my opinion will become a smaller and smaller piece of the pie that guides us to a future that keeps as many users as happy as possible.
@Demeter Dzadik Gotcha. End users must contribute to developer threads or people like you will remove features you don't use. Gotcha.
I get it, the default colors suck, you're right. Revamp them. But why would you advocate for removing any feature just because you don't see a use for it? that's my issue. You're gleefully advocating the removal of features, not just a revamp.
@0x777777 Great question! You're right, it doesn't have to be removed, but the idea is that it would force rigs to be more visually customizable on the animators' end, which could also be seen as an accessibility improvement. Today, an animator gets the colors that the rigger chooses, end of story. What if you're red-green colorblind?
If the rigger was forced to use theme colors, the animator can change the theme colors on their end, fixing their problem without bothering anyone else.
If you consider that RGB colors can only have 255 hues, and the presets will include 20 of them, that's pretty great coverage. After that, custom colors will only let you nudge the hue of your color by 12 points before running into another preset color. That's 4.7%. So, everyone is welcome to weigh the pros and cons themselves. 4.7% of hue customization for everyone vs 5% of the population being guaranteed useful colors on every rig.
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