Neck and head

@con.grennan  I've parented as face armature to the body armature before.

@Karsten K hey! Yes I'm using the shortcuts holding SHIFT to blur and CNTL to substract weights. This way I can quickly switch between different brush modes and not switch to blur in the T panel. I'm using default weight paint settings.

@Rik Schutte thank you very much ! and thanks for the course !

@Waruta Hey there. So, during Storm's rigging we had to do this with a pretty complex post-generation script, which preserved the generated rig from the neck up. The downside of that is that it's quite a bit of code held together by prayer, and takes a long time to run too. But the upside was that Rik could just do manual rigging on the part of the rig above the neck, and it would be preserved when the body rig is re-generated. I would only recommend this workflow to someone who's very comfortable with Python - you can find the script in Storm's .blend file.

What I'd recommend for everyone else, is to just create the bones and constraints in the metarig, and keep re-generating. In modern CloudRig, assigning a component type to metarig bones is not mandatory - Regular bones will just be copied over to the generated rig. So this workflow is cleaner and doesn't rely on flimsy code, BUT you have to do your face rigging in the metarig, which doesn't actually deform your character, so you might be working half-blind in some cases.

@Demeter Dzadik Thanks for the reply!

I was trying to create the bones in the metarig for a bit, but I couldn't figure out how to make a Raw Copy component deform the mesh (maybe I missed a setting somewhere), and the Single Control component creates a separate Deform bone so it was making it a bit cumbersome to keep track of things the first time around.

Anyway, I'm currently using a separate armature for the face rig to go through the course, then will think about how to merge them after. One thing I was thinking was to just keep the face armature separate and make duplicates of the face controls in the body metarig to drive the controls in the face rig, will have to see if I can make it work.

@Waruta Heya, sorry for late response again, but just wanted to at least say that the Raw Copy issue you were running into was actually a bug - It would always get the Deform checkbox disabled when you generated it, which was not intentional. Should be fixed a while ago, be sure to update to latest CloudRig! :)

@Waruta Hello ! I think I found a way to make the raw copy deform the mesh ? I assume I misunderstood with how simple the solution is..In your cloudrig metarig, you get your raw copy bone, you armature modifier parent your mesh object to the metarig. Then weight paint your mesh to that metarig bone that'll get raw-copied. Then you generate.

Doing so makes the generated rig's rawcopied bone not deform the mesh. Unless you change the mesh's Armature Modifier target.

I tried it with the cloudrig Leg component. I slapped a simple additional Deform bone on it, and weight-painted a Cube object to that bone. The cube at this stage is Armature Modifier targeting the metarig. Once the rig is generated, I change the Arm Modifier's target to the generated rig. And it seems to just...work ?

It's true that you're not supposed to use the metarig to weight paint & deform your model, but in this case where even the DEF bones are made from scratch and their names are preserved.. I don't see why this hacky workaround wouldn't work ?

@Romain Clement Thanks, that's good to know!