Rig
BlenRig 5 for Blender 2.7x (V1.02)
Juan Pablo Bouza
Publisher
This is the Legacy version of BlenRig, for Blender 2.7x.
This version is also available on GitLab.
Rig
This is the Legacy version of BlenRig, for Blender 2.7x.
This version is also available on GitLab.
Join to comment publicly.
60 comments
Exciting. Looking forward to some video tutorials :)
impresionante!!! thank you Juan, I have been creating my own rigs for a while now, long process, with your system i can complete a Professional rig/skin in the shortest time. you are a lifesaver. gracias
Hey JP. Perhaps there's a better place to ask for help, but I haven't found one. I'm having an issue with MDef on the legs of my character because they're so close together. I've tried upping the MDef precision, but it doesn't get me very far. Would you suggest I weight the mesh to the skeletal bones? I don't see a weighting option for MDef influence, so I'm stuck without another skinning option.
My files are here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ni4mv37oai6gmn2/blenrig_test.zip?dl=0
@Italic_: hi buddy, mdef 7 is the right level. Now I can't see your files cause I'm out for a couple of weeks and with a bad connection. If you can try to rotate the legs of the character a bit, to get the needed space. There is also a trick where you can make the legs thinner with a shapekey and then bind mdef with the dynamic option, thr bad thing is that dynamic is much slower. Let me know how it goes, I'll try to check on your files when I get a better connection!
@Juan Pablo Bouza: The shapekey fixed a majority of the leg, but the upper parts closer to the crotch area are still giving me trouble, even after separating both the leg and MDef meshes. I'll fiddle with the MDef cage a bit more and see if I can spread it out.
Hi this is excellent, gradually working my way through it rigging a chr I'm working on. Is there a preferred way to tweak the bone roles, for example the fingers, the way I have mine the default settings and fix roles don't quite work so I need to adjust them slightly, I did it in edit mode like I would usually and it seems to work but I noticed there was a specific button for custom bone roles and I was wondering what the correct way to do it was. Thanks so much for this it's working well so far and picked up lots of good tips for more complex mesh skinning, onto the face now :-)
Hi @mark.3dwards: after a long vacation, I'll start editing the video tutorials next week :)
Quick answer, there is a layer called rolls (or something similar). If you isolate that layer and adjust the rolls, you can then press the custom rolls button. All the bones of the rig will match the rolls from that layer.
Perfect will try it later, thanks so much for the quick answer! @Juan Pablo Bouza:
@Juan Pablo Bouza: Could I ask one more question :) all going well you have done an amazing job with this rig.
If I want to add extra bones i.e. I'm going to have a trench coat and I'll most likely need some extra deformation bones and controls for the loose parts, is there a particular bone layer I should put them on and are there any bone naming conventions I should follow in case it interferes with the code / if I do a later re-proportion (which i'm not planning to but you never know!)
I've got the face and hands up and ruining as well now with the mdef vertex group lattice trick you had in the pdf I forced myself to learn how to manually weight paint the face as I had a high poly mesh that wouldn't auto allocate the weights so that was a bit of a learning curve but got there in the end.
Hi @mark.3dwards: I'm glad to hear things are going well :)
About the extra bones, most likely you would want to parent them to the deformation layer bones. About naming conventions, I don't think there would be any issue with the code or anything. The only thing I would recommend is that you create your new bones with Alt+A in edit mode, instead of copying one of the blenrig armature bones. This is because the Blenrig bones have some custom properties for the roll angles and alignment. So, if your new bones have those properties too, and you press the "fix rolls" or "custom aligns" buttons, they would get affected and you would get an undesired result . So, create at least the first bone with Alt+A, or if you copy one of the blenrig bones, delete those custom properties from the copied bone.
@Juan Pablo Bouza: thanks again really helpful!
hi, quick question, when you fix the mesh deform to fit your model, should you do it with the lattice modifier on in edit mode, so that the changes you make are what you see in the viewport? As it is it is turned of, but it warps my model when i return to object mode.
@hemligak: make sure you bake the edited mesh then bake the armature then turn re-proportion mode off if you look at JP's BlenRig_5_Quick_Introduction_Guide.pdf page 15 section 4.2 covers the order to do it. Be really careful to try and keep the mesh roughly in alignment with the bones as you move it, the first few times I did it I didn't pay attention enough and it didnt deform well but taking my time on that part it now works great, i'd accidently moved some of the verts too far and there for moved the weightpainting for the cage as well. I didn't touch the lattice at all, just followed the instructions in the pdf.
@mark.3dwards: Ah, turn off reproportion mode, i must have missed that. No im not touching the lattice at all, i just turned it off to troubleshoot when i noticed that my deform cage was warped in obj mode after correcting it in edit mode. It was probably that i forgotten to turn of reproportion. Thx!
@hemligak: I did exactly the same as well first time :-)
I'm glad you guys solved it :)
Yeah, if you bake the armature, the lattices get reset, so they shouldn't distort the mdef cage. If for some reason the lattices are deforming the mesh, I would turn the lattice modifier off, cause you don't want that to influence the cage when you are tweaking it.
Is this compatible with the Mac? I've been trying to install it on a Mac and I'm having some trouble.
@agvazquez28: Should be compatible, what's the problem you encountered?
**@Juan Pablo Bouza: when I go to install BlendRig5 from with in Blender, opening the folder with the add-on it shows a couple different pythons scripts, I selected them all to install and nothing happens. I opened the folder that reads blenrig_biped and install the python scripts thats in that folder and it does the same thing, nothing happens. I've try instaling it at my college with a PC it gave me one python script to install and it installed fine, thats why I thought it was a PC/Mac thing.
Hi @agvazquez28! Ok, the thing is that you don't have to install all the python files like that. When you download BlenRig, you should have a Zip file, so, it is that Zip file that you have to install. You go to preferences > addons > install from file, and you select the zip from there. Then, Blender will extract everything to the correct folder and you'll see the addon in the addons list. Next, you just have to click on the checkbox to enable it. So, don't extract the contents from the zip or anything like that, just select the zip file from within Blender.
Let me know if it worked! :)
@Juan Pablo Bouza: Okay awesome, I see were I was going wrong. Thanks for clearing up my confusion. Looking forward to playing around BlenRig. Thank you
@Juan Pablo Bouza:
Hah, I was stuck with this as well, embarrassingly. It took me at least 20 minutes to work out I was meant to load the zip itself rather than extract it and do something with the package. It seems obvious now that I think about it though :)
The tool is awesome though, great work!
Hi there, little thing on the side, when I download the Official release it's in a super cryptic *.zip file "__24c1332268f5bf7e8360371acfe23a021fee325e.zip"
@alex: Hi Alex, it's fixed now. Thanks for the report!
Hey, will we be able to get a video tutorial soon please. Thank you
@Markom3D: Hi! Juan Pablo is working on video tutorials right now as we write this, it's coming soon!
@Pablo Vazquez: Awesome Cheers
I have downloaded the video files and the zip file. I notice there is a problem with the download link. Each file is just named "BlenRig" no file extension to mean a zip or a video file. I caught it quickly so I was able to rename each file after the download finished.
@rtriggs1: Hi. What do you mean with each file? The file on this asset should be downloaded as BlenRig - Official Release.zip. Just tested it on Chrome/Linux and worked fine. Or did you mean other files? Perhaps the video-tutorials? Just tested them and they also work fine. What's your browser/OS? Thanks!
@Pablo Vazquez: The only file thad downloaded with the correct name was the Documentation pdf. The video files each downloaded as "Blenrig" then the next would be "Blenrig(01)" and so on. I am using a current version of Firefox 44.0.2 (I see that an update for FF is downloading) on windows 10. There is an update for the Adobe flash player that I have not installed yet. Not sure if that has anything to do with it.
@Pablo Vazquez: I just updated the Firefox 45.0 and still have the same issue.
@Pablo Vazquez: rtriggs1 means, that when user goes to any Blenrig videocourse and instead of just watches the video on the webpage, but downloads it, selects eg. mp4, the filename that is automatically created is ALWAYS 'BlenRig'. Nothing more. No chapter number or file type, eg. mp4. It is a bit annoing.
@Ville Lukka: Ah, I see what you mean now. It seems Firefox is not very smart with spaces in the name. As in Chromium/Chrome I download it just fine with the right name:
I love this rig approach. I have a couple of questions. What are the points of no return in the rigging process? Like, when can't you make further changes to the model objects? And, when can't you make more changes to reproportioning the armature or editing the deform cage?
Hi @Bob Klassen:
Basically there are no points of no return. Regarding the rig itself and the mesh deform cage, you can absolutely retarget everything whenever you want.
In fact, something that would be close to a point of no return would be when you have added all the corrective shapekeys to the face. But even then, if you need to retarget something, you can do it because the "Bake Mesh" operator has an option to bake into a new shapekey. That way you can still rebake the character even if it has shapekeys and modifiers on it. In fact, that is how I use BlenRig for generating new characters in a very fast way, out of already rigged meshes. I'll cover that in another tutorial series.
So, no points of no return :)
Just a heads up, the ZIP file I download doesn't have the extension ".zip", therefore can't be seen by Blender. Of course renaming it solves it. And a huge thank you, this is amazing :D
Hello. First of all thanks a lot for this complex and sophisticated solution for rigging characters. It is great :-)
I'm sorry if this is duplicated question. I didnt find any answer.
I would like to ask, if there are on the Cloud or somewhere else some kind of information / tutorial on how to modify this rig? What I mean is alter number of fingers, adding some new bones etc.? It would be very helpful for me.
Thanks and have a nice day
Hi @lubomir.cenovsky:
Mmmm. no, you have information on how to use it, but there is no automatic way of adding things to the rig. Nevertheless, the rig does not use any scripting magic, so you are free to add or remove bones if you have the necessary rigging skills.
I plan to add a functionality for customizing the rig, but I still have to work on it :)
About adding new fingers, I would just enable ALL the armature layers from the armature data panel, go to Edit mode and select all the overlapping bones that correspond to the finger, then just duplicate them.
I wish to know if the rig creates a Single Hierarchy joints? So it can be exported to a game engine. Thanks!
@legcdesign:
Hi! that's an idea for a future version, I'll definitely do this. For now you should just do this manually, that is, creating this simple rig and make it follow blenrig with constraints pointed to the deformation bones.
@jpbouza: I will do that. Thank You!
Any news on an update? There was word of a move to b-bones and other improvements...
@blalan05: I haven't been able to really work on an update yet, but anyway, the bbones thing is just an optimization thing. I even don't know if it would impact performance much. Anyway, BlenRig already uses bbones, so the features on Blender 2.78 would only be useful for this optimization thing, but they won't change the functionality of the rig at all.
Is it normal that when I turn on the subdivisions, the pose disappears? Also in the render, when I set the subdivision off in the viewport but on for render, it just renders the T-pose. I've only completed the steps until part 5 so far, where I've added the mesh deform modifier. Thanks in advance for your help! I like the tutorial.
@janvandenhemel: I had the subdiv modifier above the meshdeform modifier, this was causing the problem.
Hey man can you fix the bug that Blenrig Has that turns on the "copy attributes menu" addon please?, it's very annoying, thank you!
@luciano: Is that a thing, not happening on my version.
@Stefan59: go to 3d view and press ctrl-c
@luciano: I get ya, strange its unticked in the addon.
@Stefan59: yes, it's that internally blenrig, is registering the addon, on its own.
I upgraded to 2.79 and loading up a rigged object i was working on and the tools are missing in the UI. Anyone else having this problem?
Hello! I was hoping to try out BlenRig and it says I can download the latest always available version on GitLab, but when I go there then the latest file has been deleted by the owner. Sorry, I just joined this page and I'm a little confused to how you're supposed to set this up. I tried the Download on this page as well, but it didn't actually give me a zip file at all. Any help? Thank you. Kind regards.
@maritaliivak: at https://gitlab.com/jpbouza/BlenRig there is a cloud icon with a drop down with a zip version that works plus the download on this page work for me as well. Maybe its a browser problem? Steve
Thank you! I managed to solve it. I think I also have the same problem as you mentioned that the tools are missing. Did you find a solution to that by any chance? @Stephen Petersen:
@maritaliivak: I can't remember what I did to fix it. Maybe I did a fresh install, but it all working fine. I presume you have Auto Run Python Scripts ticked in preferences?
This is very confusing. I download latest BlenRig file, how in the word do you access the actual characters???? I've paid for this membership and nothing is working!
Is blendRig for 2.8 going to be released with official 2.8?
Does this work with 2.8?
Hi Juan Pablo, I've searched for an answer, and can't find one. I've made it through some of Chapter 7 of the tutorials (weight painting the hands) while rigging my character, and I've discovered that the bone "fing_thumb_1_def_L" bends the wrong way (downward instead of toward the fingers) when I try to close the fist with "hand_close_L." I've rolled the bone every way I can possibly try (and then pressed the "custom aligns" button afterward), and it still bends downward instead of inward. My .blend file can be downloaded here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9l2k3rkfrdwkoz/SudoDuck15-Rigging-Ch07-04-ThumbProblem.blend?dl=0 I'd be very grateful for some insight (from anyone). Thanks for this amazing add-on!