Vincent
- Free
- Blender 2.80
- License: CC-BY
- 21 Apr 2016
For Blender 2.8x Eevee and Cycles Render
To take full advantage of this character rig, the latest BlenRig addon needs to be installed.
Notes on how to use the character
- Put your 3D cursor in the Origin of your scene. Choose File > Link and browse the character file
- Go to the Collections and select CH-Vincent.high. Make sure "Instance Collections" is enabled. Press Enter.
- The Collection should appear instanced in the Viewport. Select it.
- Choose Object > Relations > Make Proxy...
- In the list, select RIG-Vincent. If the model is too heavy, enable Simplify in the Render Settings.
- Pose the proxy armature to your liking and enjoy!
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Rigging Notes
In the MUSCLE SYSTEM tab of the BlenRig UI, you will find a property called "Deformation Extras". This property toggles some modifiers in the viewport that will enhance facial deformation. Note that this does not affect the rendering of the character, as those modifiers are always on for rendering. By default, Deformation Extras is off, to have a faster playback.
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Posing Vincent tutorial
Check out this very informative video by Hjalti on how to unleash the power of BlenRig to pose and animate Vincent!
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Legacy version
Here is a version of Vincent compatible with the Blender 2.7 series: {attachment Invalid slug vincent-27 - should be a static_asset id}
44 comments
Hey I know most of the latest Blender Studio projects have been utilizing Rigify, but I was curious to know if you thought BlenRig is still worth learning and using instead?
Good Job!!! Awesome!
Hi, I am a new to blender...any way. I have followed these steps to the T and yet still when I try to move Vincent, I cannot move any part of him. Any idea as to what I need to do? (I'm using blender 2.8)
- Put your 3D cursor in the Origin of your scene. Choose File > Link and browse the character file
- Go to the Collections and select CH-Vincent.high. Make sure "Instance Collections" is enabled. Press Enter.
- The Collection should appear instanced in the Viewport. Select it. Choose Object > Relations > Make Proxy...
- In the list, select RIG-Vincent.
@leginkhan Hey! Just to clarify, you have the armature selected and you cannot pose it when in pose mode? Did you link or append anything into your file prior to that?
Hi I am having a problem geting the rig to work. I am following the notes on how to use the character when I follow the first step to go to its file and link it comes up with an error saying Vincent.blend: not a library. Is there somting im doing wrong?
Can I use this character in a project of my own? For release? Or is there a licence with this character?
@Jason Forth: Yes you can use this character on a project of your own. The license is CC BY, Creative Commons Attribution.
The only thing you need to do is credit the original authors: "CC BY - cloud.blender.org"
@Pablo Vazquez: Thanks so much. Credit will be given.
Hello All - thanks so much for the character and rig! top notch work. My question is - if I want to change the mesh to maybe shorts and different hair - can I simply unbind the mesh from the mdef cage, make the character mesh changes then rebind the mesh? Would I need to put in reproportion mode? Unfortunately I have struggled getting my own mesh to work as I wanted with straight application of blenrig5. If I could "redeploy" the armature and deform mesh cage to an updated character model - if not drastically different, should that work? also super work on Agent 357 and can't wait for episode 2 of Cosmos Laundromat...
Hi I love the character. BlenRig makes everything much easier to animate. But I'm having trouble with it. At some point I accidentaly hid Vincent mash and when I typed Shift+Z (undo thingy), it appeared ... but deformed. It's like that weard monster in movie The Thing, but less slimy. Anyway, I tried reopening the file (twice) and it didn't help. So I admit I'm a little nervous ... It's not that important since it's just a little test to improve my skills, but if there is a solution, I'd appreciate it very much. Also I googled it and nothing similar popped up.
Thanks :)
Hi @Gorzy Gorup<span class="username">(savin.gorup)</span>:
Well, yes, that's weird. The only thing I can think of is that the mesh object could have been moved from it's original position and it is not aligned with the armature anymore. Can you try selecting the mesh and pressing alt+g to see if that's the case? That should move the model back to its original location.
Hello, @jpbouza:
Thank you for your response, but sadly it didn't help. As far as I know, mesh didn't move. I suppose it is just a bug. I managed to find a solution by appending all of the objects in the file to another file, linking Vincent again and applying his animation (action) from previous file. It solved the problem as Vincent is back to normal.
Best regards :)
Hi Andy, Great Rig! Would it be okay to use this character commercially? I would like to use it for an editorial piece on a news program. I will happily credit everyone involved in the making of this character once posted online as the actual show does not have credits when aired. Let me know, Thanks!
@Michael Carella: Hey! This character is licensed as CC-BY, so you can use it even commercially as long as you give credit to Blender Cloud: https://cloud.blender.org/blog/blender-cloud-v3
Cheers! .andy
@Andy Goralczyk: Awesome, that's great! Thank you!
Hello and thanks for the excellent work! I had an issue while animating the character. It seems that if you move the controllers under the "vincent_blenrig" controller (wich control the entire character) the feet are blocked by some sort of limit. I fix the probleme by moving the vincent_blenrig controller down and moving the character back on the top. Here an image: http://s33.postimg.org/rd68l9njj/Vincent.jpg
I don't know if this make sens to you but whatever your character is doing, you can't animate it below this controller so you should place the character carfully before even begin to animate. OR I missed something and i'm sorry :D
If it can't be fixed, people should know about this.
Anyway, have fun with this amazing Rig !
Hey @Thibault Barbaroux:
I'm pretty sure this is because of the FLOOR controllers you can find on the Extras layers. Look for them and move them down, the issue should be fixed. Those floor controllers are used for automatically tweaking things such as a walkcycle when you have an irregular terrain. So if you grab them and pull them to the bottom of the scene they shouldn't bother you anymore :D
I'm sorry about this, my intention is to do a tutorial covering all the controls, but I still have to finish the rigging a character tutorials and I'm busy rigging the Agent 327 too!!
@Juan Pablo Bouza: Ho Thank you ! Yeah I know you will do a tutorial, I read that in previous comment but I couldn't resist to share this in case someone has the same issue. I just check and the floor controllers are in the layer EXTRAS. Next time i will search a little harder x]
Agent 327 looks great so far ! can't wait to see the final result! Good luck with this project.
For anyone struggling to hit 24 FPS like I was when I first opened Vincent the fast way to do it is hit simplify in the scene panel and change the subdivisions to 0
@Corey Lowe:
Yes, the file is saved with subsurf level 2. But the best way to change that is to go to the blenrig panel, and under the body picker tab you'll see a "model res" slider. That is from where you change the subdivision level of the character.
Cheers!
hey @Corey Lowe:
Yes, once I finish with the rigging tutorials, the first thing I'll do is a tutorial about controls.
For now, you can watch these two videos from Cosmos Laundromat, which use a very similar rig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLzCSzfQe8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILguM8P5r0k
About linking, I think you should delete the current vincent and the rig, or start with a new scene, and relink both groups, _high and _low. If you start from a new scene, you could append the action that contains your animation and assign it again to the armature. Then, select the high group and do the make proxy thing, and select the blenrig armature. You'll see that the armture will control both versions of vincent. Then you have two options, you can put the low version in one layer and the high in another one, or you can delete the low version, and then from the Object panel - duplication (blender standard properties panels), you'll find a group field from where you can choose low or high, when you select the mesh of vincent.
About the IK, you're looking for the arm HINGE option, it's one of the sliders besides the arm in the body picker.
Anyway, yes, I'll cover all these things in the tutorials :)
@Juan Pablo Bouza: Oh well that's handy, I just know it was a trick from using the CG Cookie rig, actually after playing with the Blendrig for a couple of hours there is a ton of stuff going on and i have no idea what I'm doing! I should probably watch some videos or something. Do any of the Blendrig videos yet cover using it?
I actually stopped getting 24 FPS as soon as I started animating so I shouldn't have said anything, if I knew how to switch between the high poly and low poly proxy and how to get the arm IK to stay in the same place when i rotate the body I think I would be set. I have Vincent linked into my scene just as the high poly since I am not sure how to switch between the two meshes and the arms seem to be automatically be IK controlled but when you rotate his body his hands follow with him instead of staying in place on top of this cubicle wall. Maybe I am already screwed since I started animating with the high poly Vincent?
Anyway I am just kind of rambling on but this is a cool rig if I could figure out what I'm doing, I've got an I7 4770k and a GTX 970 running Windows 8.1
any way to separate the hand's ik from the body so when i move the "master_torso" control the hands stay in place?
@Luciano Muñoz: In the BlenRig UI under the ARM_L section, there's an option labeled "hinge" that will toggle this functionality. Same on the right side. This changes the space from the global control to the root. Hinges under the HAND categories affect the hand's orientation space specifically.
@Juan Pablo Bouza: yeah after you mentioned all of this i figured out about the rig in the other layer, much better speeds indeed. Thank you guys so much.
I got a question or more like a suggestion, since the rig picker is so complex for a beginner is very hard to understand, and also while the layers are off picking the controllers that are in them doesn't let you make a thing. wouldn't it be nice that having a layer hidden means either controller grayed out or just not visible, it would unclutter the picker UI if you're animating with less panels on. Lastly i would add the pivot controllers and the necks 2-3 extra and even the spine ik ones to an other layer that could be as a part of body 2, or body tweaks, again to unclutter the main control system =) all in all, this is really fantastic work man!
@Luciano Muñoz:
Yes, this that Jeffrey says is what I meant, there is a proxy model in the second layer of vincent's scene, and when you link the character you can link both groups, vincent_high and vincent_low, so that you can switch from high to low in order to work with a decent speed.
About the new depsgraph, forget about it for now. Good news is that speeding up the depsgraph might be one of the concerns of the agent project. So I also hope BlenRig can run as fast as with the old one after that!
I find the new depsgraph does drop speed initially, but if you up the subdivision levels it doesn't drop per level like it does in the old graph. In the rig file, the proxy mesh is on layer 2. If you link the rig, you'll link the group "vincent_low" into the new scene.
For additional performance, I enable opensubdiv on all the subsurf modifiers and bring them to the top of the stack. This only works if you have subdivision set to 1 or more, otherwise subsurf doesn't compute. There are various tweaks in the user prefs that affect drawing, but they don't give you enough of a speed boost to bother with them.
JP is right in regards to optimizations; the rig is not the issue; it's the deformations. I get about 60 FPS with just the rig, 35 with the proxy mesh, 24 on the high-res mesh without subdivisions, 9 with one level. In the new depsgraph I get ~26 FPS on just the rig, 19 with the proxy mesh, and ~15 with the high-res mesh without subdivisions.
@Juan Pablo Bouza: if low resolution means: "Model_Res: 0" then yes, unless there is a proxy version or something that i dont know how to activate.
In the RIG optimizations panel i have everything unticked.
I did turn on the new depsgraph and it dramatically went down from 19-21 fps to 9-10 fps, i thought it should be faster right?...
and latstly the only armature layer i have on is the Body layer
**@Luciano Muñoz: **
Are you saying the low resolution version of vincen doesn't reach 24 fps? I've got an i7 3930k here and it runs at 40 fps. But I'm talking about the vincent_low model, not the one you render. I'm running linux here, I know that windows goes a bit slower with animation playback, and I don't know about mac. The rigging panel has an optimization tab, have you tried unchecking some of the checkboxes?
The thing with optimizating the rig, is that there is nothing I can do to optimize it actually, all the body mechanics are not really complex to process. The most complex part there is, is the facial rig, which actually has more bones than the body itself, hehe, but there's no way to optimize that, except deleting the whole facial rig. So, I could do a preset without facial rig and people could do their own facial stuff with shapekeys.
How many fps do you get by seeing just the Armature layer? And, you are not using the new depsgraph, are you? Cause currently that is really slow.
@None None:
The optimization is not to be done in the rig, but with the deformation technique, that's why if you use mesh deform, you should always create a proxy version of the character. I'll cover that in one of the last chapters of the tutorials I'm publishing.
@Juan Pablo Bouza: we're just rambling, but thanks for listening, it's just most rigs Space Switch are usully in their IK hands instead of the arms, and it's very hard to figure out how to use this rig without the GUI btw.
And though I'm having a bit of a hard time getting used to the BlenRig i love that is so complete and powerful, though I'd try and have a lighter version, most of the people i know including myself cant make any of the rigs run at 24fps on the view port at their lowest resolution,, and the slowest computer I have is a mac i7 2770 all quad cores and all with at least 8gb of ram, so some optimization would be very much appreciated =)
@Jeffrey H @Luciano Muñoz:
What is this I hear?? Are you criticizing my beautiful GUI??????
OK, I'll take note of who you guys are, starting my black list righ here :p
Haha, ok, I"ll see if I can change those labels soon :)
@Luciano Muñoz: I agree, it's not very intuitive. I'm used to standard Maya naming conventions with labeling like "space switch" or "isolate," both of which are more descriptive than "hinge," particularly because hinging is a function in multiple places for different purposes. Perhaps I'll submit a pull request relabeling these switches.
@Jeffrey H: oh man, finally!, thanks!, i tested that so many times but from the hand hinge, because it didnt make sense to me that it was in the arm controls.
Looks Great !!
This is amazing
I've got to see how he looks on the hoverbike I'm making, rendering Sintel riding it right now ;)
Wow. Thanks to everyone involved for this. A new learning adventure begins...NOW!
What a nice character. I will definitely enjoy practicing some animation with him. I would absolutely love it if the was maybe a female version to go along with Vincent maybe a Vicky.
I haven't really used Blen Rig that much but one thing that bugs me is that the generated rig is too dependent on Blen Rig it kind of reduces the portability of the rig compared to those generated by rigify.
You can't just give your rigged character to someone the need blen rig along with it and it has to be the correct version of blen rig as I discovered with some of the "older" characters on the cloud.
I am starting to sound a bit too whiney, so let me just say thanks because I am definitely 100% going to be making use of Vincent, am currently learning how to animate. The character design is really top notch.
Hi @Fred M'ule:
If understand correctly what you say, maybe it is not totally true. One of my concerns with blenrig is that the rig doesn't have to be dependent of any script. So, if you disable the addon the rig will still work perfectly well. In fact, I'm not a coder or anything close to it, so I really don't like it when things are hidden in code and not available to casual users. BlenRig is all about Blender's default constraints system, it doesn't even use py drivers, haha.
So, the only thing that you won't get if you don't have the addon, is the GUI, but you can always change the FK / IK and other properties from the properties bones. If you have any trouble using it, let me know!
See you!
This is great! I can't wait till this evening when I have time to really check it out...the shaders are awesome!
Awesome guys! Thank you for sharing :-)
Really cool! I love the cartoon style similar to DespicableMe and the shading (not full realistic).
@Antonio Vazquez: can you make me a female version I am new at modeling I have made a set and I need his guys love interest and I like your style. The girl would need to be out of his range in looks but in the same style let me know
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