Characters
Rain
Demeter Dzadik
Publisher
Rain is a generic character rig you can use to learn and practice your animation sills, created by us here at the Blender Studio.
How to link/append
First off, ask yourself if you even NEED to link or append the rig into another file. Probably not! But if you do:
- Link/Append the collection whose name starts with "CH".
- In the 3D View Header: Object -> Relations -> Make Library Override.
- Save and Reload the file, to allow scripts to execute. (This will also fix her materials)
Then simply enter pose mode on the armature and start animating!
The rig is free to use, provided that the you respect the CC-BY license and include the credit: Rain Rig © Blender Foundation | cloud.blender.org
Check out a walkthrough of the rig's features in this video:
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40 comments
I want to learn how to rig the face like this character. Is this purely bones driven, or mixture of both bones and shape keys???
@DARRIN ALDER It is a mix (you can just check if a mesh has shape keys). I guess you could just reverse engineer the rig piece by piece. But a new rigging tutorial would be nice.
@DARRIN ALDER
Congratulations on the release, Mets. Looking great!
Awesome! I have been animating with v1.0 for a few weeks now : )
is it on purpose that the left hand is set to a different IK parent than the right one by default?
@Anže Orehek It's not, good catch, fixed & thanks!
This is a really nice rig, but for some reason, poses aren't saved when the rig is proxied? I don't know if I've done something wrong as I'm still very new to using character rigs
@lski Same thing happened to me, I made my first actually nice pose (I'm still learning too) and I rendered it but after I closed the project and re-opened it, it was reset to the original t-pose. I haven't tried yet, but I think you have to create a new action in the Action Editor (inside of Dope Sheet) and make your changes while the proxy has that action selected.
EDIT: I tried this and unfortunately it doesn't work. I haven't found a way to save the pose, but I'll update this comment if/when I do.
EDIT 2: Okay, I found a way to work around this, but it's a little bit of a lengthy answer to put on this thread. There's a question on StackExchange about this and I answered it to the best of my ability. Linked here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/183573/rig-pose-of-proxy-armature-isnt-saved/186248#186248
Hello, I just have one question what is the fk hinge about. I mostly do arms in fk and I really don't see much difference from 1 to 0 when I change it. I thought it was supposed to change the elbow movement to more closely represent nature.
@kimokee Heyo. When FK Hinge is set to 1 for a given limb, that limb doesn't inherit rotation from its parent. So try rotating the pelvis to see the difference!
Hey there :) Awesome rig, I love it. When I link it she is all black; it renders ok, but the viewport solid mode is black for all the shaders, Am I the only having this issue? I've also tried runnig the script, but nothing changes :( Thanks :)
@Nicolas D'Amore Set your shading mode to Material. The default is Textured, but she doesn't use textures for her colors, so she ends up all black by default :)
How were you able to get the different layers of deformation on the face? In Maya this would normally be done with different rigs on duplicates of the mesh that feed into a final deformation mesh via blendshapes that are always turned on, but shape keys don’t work like that in Blender. I’ve been trying to figure this out for forever!
Most of the deformation is handled by bendy bones. Then there are some shape keys on top of that to bring out some extra detail or fix dodgy areas. And finally there's a slight touch of Corrective Smooth for, well, what it says.
So, the control bones move the bendy bones and activate shape keys. That's all there is to it. One rig, one mesh. Sorry, it's probably not a very detailed answer, but I don't know how it works in Maya so I can't really answer in the context of that.
Would you mind go deeper into the b-bone based facial rig? I'm able to recreate the mechanisms (tangential handles in conjunction with constraints, etc. ) But still would I like to know how did you came up with this brilliant idea!
@Baichuan Wu Lots of headache! I'm actually very impressed if you managed to reverse engineer it. But the thing is, since this rig was created, there have been some improvements in Blender to constraints that make this setup a lot easier to achieve, namely thanks to the new Mix Mode setting on Copy Rotation constraint. Can recommend!
Thanks a lot for this! <3 Suppose I have a scene already made, how can I append this character? When I select append I have to chose among several folders and don't know what to do there. Also, I don't know if that would break the script for the controls. So what are the steps to import this character into another scene?
Thanks in advance!
@Rodrigo Neira Hey there. You want to go inside the Collections folder within the .blend, then choose the collection CH-rain. Then for the rig UI to show up, you need to do a save and reload.
If you're appending you'll need to unhide the rig in the Outliner with the screen icon, which is hidden by default, see the Filters drop-down.
If you're linking, you need to run the Make Proxy operator and then select RIG-rain in the popup.
Hope that helps!
@Demeter Dzadik, I've found what I think could be an unexpected behavior or a bug, could please confirm?
from the default pose: legs in ik, legs stretch in 0 (no stretch) and move a leg backwards, untill the foot separates from the floor (in other words, the foot goes up becouse it can stretch). Now, if I rotate the Roll foot control to lift up the heel, the foot pivots in "the air" instead of doing it in the actual position of the foot control and returning to the floor, since the knee is now bending and there is a little more room for the leg to stretch.
It causes some issues at animating walk cycles, for instance, in my opinion.
Thanks in advance :)
@Demeter Dzadik Also, it would be nice to have controls for ears movement :)
@Edwin Hernandez Thanks, this is a known issue, it's just that fixing it would be quite involved (ie. re-working the foot rig) and it hasn't come up in production yet so I didn't get around to it.
Rig
Hi Demeter! Thanks for the rig! Can you please advice here can I turn on a visibity of FK-bones of the hands? I want to retarger some 3rd party animations onto it. Thanks!
@ALAN KODZAEV You should be able to just enable the FK layer in the rig's UI and then Alt+H if they are hidden (but they should start out visible in the first place, so I'm a bit confused by the question :D)
@Demeter Dzadik Yes, Im an idiot ). Thanks!
when I look at the clothes in wireframe, particularly the top, I notice the thickness comes from having a mesh inside and out. If the mesh on the inside is never seen, is there a reason it is included in the model? Aren't those polygons having to be rendered unnecessarily?
@Wayne Batchelor The Solidify modifier is very cheap to compute, so it's worth it for not having to maintain the deformations of the curved edge of the mesh that would be present if the modifier were applied, and the inner section deleted. As it is, weight painting and authoring shape keys on a flat mesh is very simple, Solidify takes care of the thickness, and Subdivision takes care of the curvature; And you need Subdivision anyways.
Otherwise would cost a ton of work hours for virtually no performance benefit, maybe even a performance loss, since now you need to deform more vertices (the ones that make up the modelled edge) which previously didn't need to be deformed since Solidify and Subsurf happen after deformation is already done.
@Demeter Dzadik Wow, thanks, I've been jumping through hoops to keep polygons down and didn't really need to worry about this.
This is a great model and rig.. just rendering why both RAIN and SNOW have separate head and body meshes - it seems problematic. Moving the shoulders causes the two meshes to separate
Is awesome rig! but does it need that many bone ?
@richard Sierra Nope!
There is all kinds of different IK/FK rig controls in the CloudRig menu. Is there a simple way to turn the IK for the arms on and off? Rig is great by the way! Thank you!
@Jerod Chirico There is a section in that same UI called "FK/IK Switching". Sorry if it's a bit confusing! >.>
It's a really really great works. Great rig is like an art!!! :) Thank you always.
Maybe it's just me but I can't seem to get the FK arms to show up. The ponytail seems to shoot out from behind her as well
@chickensandbeandip The FK bones are hidden by default, you can press Alt+H to unhide them. I'm not entirely sure why I did it like that, this rig could probably use a bit of an update to be totally honest. I'll put that on my TODO.
@Demeter Dzadik What am I selecting when I press Alt H? It doesn't do anything just in the scene. The issue Im having is they are there to select?
@chickensandbeandip If the FK arm controls aren't visible, you want to enter pose mode, make sure the relevant armature layers are enabled, and then press Alt+H to un-hide. Then red circular controls should show up near the arms, which are the FK controls. But they won't do anything if the arm is in IK mode, obviously.
Hi! Thanks for this nice rig! A few issues i have encountered with the current Rain v2 version:
- MSTR-Chest is in the IK secondary layer instead of primary.
- When trying to select the controller for the eye dots, there are two selectable DEF controllers with different transforms orientations and locked channels : DEF-EyeDot.R and DEF-EyeDot.R.001.
Also I happen to be working on a scene with both Rain and Snow rigs, and it seems they don't match layers and functions. And the sidebar panels present nothing to tell them apart. Maybe it would be enough to name the panels after the characters;
Thanks for the great work!