Bone-Studio’s Juan Gea has released a recording of the first in a series of livestream explaining how to animate in create character animations in Blender. The first instalment looks at several production ready rigging solutions for Blender and makes connections with 3dsMax or Maya for artists that are already familiar with Biped, CAT or Human IK. Watch the recording on YouTube and check out Juan’s channel for many more Blender videos in English and Spanish.
Great tutorials, great teacher. I’m enjoying blender a lot and it makes my job easier and more fun
Thanks
Glad to hear that! Thanks! 😀
Stumbled across Auto-Rig Pro last night so perfect timing. For rigging I know Mixamo has become a popular automated option but if there are any issues or tweaking needed you are out of luck. Maya has a basic autorig setup for bipeds but it is very simple. For mostly automated, quality rigs is Auto-Rig Pro one of the best options around? Modo seems to have a plugin for automatic rigging but a big price tag for one purpose & InstantRig for Max is just keyframe animation, no mocap data.
One of the best I know, but I cannot be sure, what I was looking for was not exactly “automated” rigging, but more a versatile rig that could be used in several situations and that at the same time is very fast to setup, in Max you have CAT or Biped, in Blender you have Rigify or AutoRig Pro, both of them are similar, but of those four only ARP has a fully automated process of bone creation where you don´t have to locate the bones, you just have to refine the solution in the end 🙂
Cheers!
Juan, how do you find blender’s painting and skinning tool? Rigging in blender is something I haven’t gotten into just yet..
Well, in the next streaming I will be painting weights so we´ll see, so far I like them, in 2.8 there are some quirks because we don´t have everything polished and finishes, like we have a lack of wireframe for the bones, but everything will come at one point, in the end it´s still Beta 🙂
Bear in mind that I don´t go into all the rigging techniques and such things, there are plenty of tutorials out there, I want to create a rig to talk and teach animation, and specially I want a rig system that allows me to work as fast as I was working with CAT, Biped or HIK, so far Rigify and AutoRig Pro are being pretty good, specially AutoRig Pro that has some pretty neat features like the smart rig tool that put the bones in place for you, pretty good 🙂
Cheers!
My dream Rigging system would be a blend of Instant-rig and Cat-motion.
actually could you use Houdini’s chops system copy cat motion??
Yeah, I think it could be possible, the problem is that I won’t use Houdini for rigging, at least for the time being, I don’t want animators to have to animate in Houdini, that part of is done in Blender, it’s a pleasure to animate in Blender 🙂
Anyways, while CAT Motion is great, is somewhat limited, but you can always create the cat motion in max and then export it to FBX and use it in other rig in Blender or Houdini for example, in Blender, Autorig Pro has a retarget addon for this 🙂 (and no need to update your max version for this if you have a permanent license 🙂 )
Cool i’ll give Cat and Auto-Rig a try with fbx, with 3dsmax 2015 “permanent” license i use, thanks for the info! 🙂
For that use the AutoRig Pro for Blender 2.79, the retarget addon is not ready yet for 2.8 🙂
just finished watching your video, AutoRig seems amazing,
are there any things you don’t like about it?
also do you know of any blender plugin that can add overlap to rigs like in InstantRig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9BxJmEItek&t=3s
I think there is a constraint in Blender for something similar, I’ll ask around and I’ll take a look to the constraint, instant rig seems a pretty cool tool for some cases 🙂
danke
I´m not sure yet about the constraint because I barely had time these days, but I recommend you to enter here:
https://blender.chat
You will need a Blender Id to login, it´s free and you can create one here:
https://www.blender.org/id/register/
There you will find more people that will be happy to help you with any question, don´t worry if you come from a max background, no one will bite if you name max and compare things to explain what you are asking, I do it A LOT and other users do it too, specially because there are a lot of new Blender users that come from Max or Maya, so the comparison is mandatory to explain what people is looking for 🙂
Cheers!
(Anyways as soon as I have the answer I will post it here)
neato! i’ll join the blender development fund too
That is awesome Mortas, thanks for that! It benefits everyone 🙂
I investigated the spring thing, it seems that there is no spring constraing, but there are several addons out there that can do similar things, this is one of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up4L2wYsorI
I´m not sure if this will be ported over to 2.8, I did ask the author in his youtube comments because the addon seems great.
Cheers!
Vic Yu replied to your question on YT and he posted a download link for 2.8 😉
Awesome! Thanks for the heads up! 🙂
This is Juang in person! I will check this out.