Rigify Made Easy: Beginner's Guide to Effortless Character Rigging 

thank you so much, I hope it helped you in some way.

Thank you for watching, I hope they can help you, if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.

My pleasure, thank you for watching.

Thank you so much, Glad it helped you, I'm gonna make a custom rigging tutorial soon, hope it can help you too.

Glad it helped!

You're welcome, I'm glad it helped you, and thank you for watching.

Thank you for watching, make sure to comment any question you have, cheers

@@mck3D Clear! i have a video suggestion: how to fix rig errors with weight painting, i have a lot of problems with this

@@IHhardware Thank you for your suggestion, I will do this video soon, please wait a little bit.

@@mck3D Thank you so much!!!

Appreciate it! Thank you for watching and for your comment.

My pleasure, haha, I don't even know why should we enable it when it's a built-in addon, anyway I'm glad that it helped you.

thank you so much, I'm glad that it helped you.

No Problem, Thank you for watching.

Hey, thanks for asking, you hold "Shift" key on your keyboard and press "A" key it should open the menu for adding things in blender, don't hesitate to ask question if you still have problems, best wishes

You're welcome, 1- Please make sure that you are in object mode not edit mode, as you are in edit mode when you match the skeleton joints. 2- Please make sure that click on an empty space in the viewport to deselect everything then select the model first and shift + select the rig, the rig should be the second (active) selection as everything that you select last will be the parent and others will be the child. 3- Please make sure that you are selecting the rig, not the skeleton. With all these, you should be able to see the parent with the automatic weight paint option. If everything is fixed then congratz, but if you see the parent with the automatic weight paint option and when you click nothing happens and the rig doesn't move the model, please check for errors when you parenting in the bottom right corner of the Blender. If you don't see the parent with automatic weight paint, there is a mistake somewhere in between, you can send me a picture or video and we will fix the problem because the order of selection should be the mesh first then the rig. Please notify me of your results.

I'm not sure if it's what you are looking for, please correct me if I'm wrong but If you want to export the model with the rig, as long as your model is already weight-painted, and everything is working fine in the source application, you can export the model as FBX and make sure to select the armature to export as well as the model.

Thanks

This is not uncommon, I copy my answer to one of the comments with the same issue: Probably, if the character doesn't move with the rig, there is a high chance that you've got an error during the skinning phase (when you select the rig and model to parent them with auto-weight paint), so please check these things once again to make sure: 1- Make sure you've applied the transforms for the skeleton if you resized it (most of the time we need to resize the skeleton) then regenerate the rig again, or if you scaled the model to the skeleton's size, please apply the transforms on the model, you can do this by pressing CTRL + A. 2- Make sure to place bones inside the models, sometimes if you place bones outside of the model you will get an error in the weight-paint phase, and please check them in different camera angles. 3- When you try to move the skeleton joints in place in the beginning phases if you select one joint then move it, sometimes there are two joints that should move together and if you separate them, the rig will break, that's why I always suggest to box-select the joints (click and drag outside of the model for the selection box to appear), if you're joints are separated you need to delete everything and start with new rigify skeleton. with all that said, still it might be your model that is problematic, if your model has some intersected parts, sometimes that will confuse the algorithm and this might happen.

there are two most common poses for characters, A-Pose and T-Pose. T-Pose is the pose where the arms are placed 90 degrees to the body up in the air, and your character makes the letter T, and the A-Pose is a slightly closer arms position where your character makes the Letter A. the reason behind these poses is for the rigging artist to be able to rig and skin the character easily because if the armpit is closed together it's nightmare. in most cases creating a character in A pose is just fine, because normally characters don't have that much big arms that collide with armpits. But if the characters is a mascular character you need to create it in T-Pose. For game characters most of the time the companies use T-Pose because they want to make sure regardless of character type and shape they can rig every character easily and they will keep a general rule for the pose too, so they can use scripts and other stuff. In the end companies decide which pose you should sculpt in but if it's for your own then you decide for your character.

@@mck3D I appreciate it

My Pleasure.

I'm also using sketchfab models if that makes a difference.

No question is dumb Saezyyy, when I started 3D I've been lost even in the viewports, so don't worry and ask anything. about your problem, I'm pretty sure that you did get an error during the weight painting process (skinning), if you look at the bottom right of Blender when you try to parent with automatic weight paint probably you see an error there, my guess is: 1 - that either you separate two joints in the Rigify skeleton when you try to move them in place, that's why I always recommend to box select (click outside of the model and drag to the selection box appears) the joint so that we don't make separation where it should not be. 2 - In your model might be some separations in the model itself or some intersections (some parts of the model are inside of other parts) and when you try using automated weights, the Blender can't figure out how to paint the model. 3 - It might be that your model is not optimized for rigging, some times artists made models only to show them and they are not optimized, models that are not optimized have too many polygons or dirty (or automated) topology that can cause issues, or sometimes your model comes with rig itself so you can't parent them to new rig. If the third is not the case please check the other two, and if you still had problems please come back to me, we will solve your problem.

@@mck3D Thank you bro I appreciate you a lot

My Pleasure, don't hesitate to ask any question.

Thank you for your suggestion, I'm not a Unity guys, actually I never touched the Unity in my life, haha, but it doesn't mean that I'm not gonna take your suggestion into a video, I'm going to make video about importing these rigs to Unreal Engine, then I will make sure to make one for Unity or maybe I make the Unity one first because it's more popular in mobile gaming.

@@mck3DThank you for your response. Unity has a very large online presence and if you were to make tutorials directed towards those users then you'd subsequently grow yourself. It would very beneficial to the community to see workflow between Blender, Rigify and , and i would humbly ask that you do tutorials for the ones that people can use that are free and powerful game vision creation tools such as Unreal and Unity and Godot. The issue i recently ran into was when importing the armature into Unity. The Avatar setup (setting up the humanoid skeleton in this case) could not find the proper connections with the DEF bones assigned. That may be able to be rectified but it's something too heavy for me to get into. I think I will stick to animating within Unity (UMotion Pro) or creating my own rigs in Blender and exporting the DEF bones then into Unity atleast so the animations work with the mesh. If you have a proper skeleton, then Unity's humanoid animation property allows for easy retargetting of any humanoid animation to any properly created humanoid rig. So in this sense you'd also be creating a powerful workflow to create general animations that can be used across all humanoid skeletons. Either way, thanks for creating this! Look forward to more.

My pleasure, and thank you for your suggestions, I will definitely consider that. And thank you for your information regarding the unity skeletons, it will surely help me approaching this. So thank you again, and please stay tuned, I will make some new tutorials soon.

Hi, let's see, did you put the bones on front so that you see the bones through the character? And then did you select the bones and went to edit mode to be able to box select the joints? If the generated rig is weird please first check that before generating the rig you apply all transforma for the model and for the skeleton by pressing ctrl + a and selecting apply all transform, this will apply the transforms, most of the time the generated rigs problem is this, but other thing you can do is to check that bones are place where they should be inside the character and if you have a problem with the foot rig please check that your toe bone is in place inside the foot and your heel bone is outside the foot behind the character's foot where the heel will roll

@@mck3D I already check it, and you're right, Im using different selection mode, and now I can use selection box, and about the weird generated rig, its a bit hard to align it, problable because my models isnt really symatrical, but overall this answers really help me, thanks a lot man!

I'm glad that I was to help you. In general if your model does not have symmetry or at least near perfect symmetry, rigging it with auto rigging addons is a pain and you need to make custom rigs, because they are just programs that looking for some features in your model to rig them and when for example they find the ankle in z=1 x=1 y=1 and then the other ankle in z=1 x=0 y=1 (the numbers are just for example) they don't know how exactly they should threat this situation and they sometimes mess up the rigging. and once again thank you for watching the video and asking me your questions. Have a great day ^^

Probably, if the character doesn't move with the rig, there is a high chance that you've got an error during skinning phase (when you select the rig and model to parent them with auto weight-paint), so please check these things once again to make sure: 1- Make sure you've applied the transforms for the skeleton if you resized it (most of the time we need to resize the skeleton) then regenerate the rig again, or if you scaled the model to the skeleton's size, please apply the transforms on the model, you can do this by pressing CTRL + A. 2- Make sure to place bones inside the models, sometimes if you place bones outside of the model you will get an error in the weight-paint phase, and please check them in different camera angles. 3- When you try to move the skeleton joints in place in the beginning phases if you select one joint then move it, sometimes there are two joints that should move together and if you separate them, the rig will break, that's why I always suggest to box-select the joints (click and drag outside of the model for the selection box to appear), if you're joints are separated you need to delete everything and start with new rigify skeleton. with all that said, still it might be your model that is problematic, if your model has some intersected parts, sometimes that will confuse the algorithm and this might happen.

@@mck3Dnow it moves, but for some reason, ears, nose and his pipe just stay there and i try and try and they don't want to move.

I'm glad to hear that it's fixed, for those problems it's easy to fix, if the pipe is not rigged and if it's a separate model, just select the pipe then select the head bone and press CTRL + P then select "Bone", this way the pipe will move with the head bone. If it's not separate model and it's part of the model, go to edit mode, bring your mouse cursor on one of the pipe vertices and press L, this will select all the pipe depending on the UV, then on the right menu, go to the data panel (the green triangle), then in the vertex group (these are the bones), select the bone responsible for the neck, below the vertex group put the value on 1 then press assign, this will assign the weight-paint of one to all of the pipe for the specified bone. P.S: you can simply select your model, go to weight-paint, then again in the data panel select the bones and see the influence of them on different parts, when you found the bones responsible for head, you should see the pipe, nose, ears are red, it mean that they will fully move with this bone, if not, just paint them red(value 1) or do it with the previous method. P.S 2: when you move through the vertex groups (bone) your model will turn purple color instead of blue to red default color, these bones are IK bones just ignore them and move forward. don't hesitate to message me if there is a problem, or even if you couldn't find what I meant.

Not knowing new things is not stupid at all William, it fine. About your issue if you did everything in the video and you didn't get any error (in the bottom right bar of blender) then it should probably be ok. Just select the Rig not the skeleton, and go to pose mode, the best way to test your rig is by moving the IK controllers, those are the square shapes in the hands, feet, and hip, select one of them for example the leg, press G and move your mouse to move it, your character leg, should move, if your character moves it should be fine, but if the rig moves but not your character's leg, there is problem.

Thank you for commenting, I didn't quite catch what is your problem. Can you explain it in detail? what is the exact problem and in which phase do you encounter it?

@@mck3D can you explain me ''active object is not selected mesh''' when this error show and how to solve it

You get this error when you try to do something in Blender but you forget to select anything like mesh or skeleton, ... for example if you try to parent your mesh to your rig but you've forgot to select the mesh and you just select the rig and you've get this error, I can help you further if you can tell me exactly when do you get this error.

Thank youuuuuuuu so much, yes Thank youuuuuu, I appreciate it man, it's my pleasure.

you can either save this scene and append it to another scene: file => append, but the way I like to do it is to open both blender scenes at one, then on this scene copy my model with rig with CTRL + C and in the other scene paste it with CTRL + V.

I appended collection and it worked, thank you and good tutorial 👍👍

I'm glad to hear that, and thanks.

Thanks, sure, I will create more videos on these topics, thank you for watching and please stay tuned.

if the body parts move when you move the bones but weirdly, like lagging behind or deforming, it's because of the bad weight painting, for some reason auto weight painting can't recognize the best way to weight paint your model, and for example, if for the hands only the hand bones should have influence, right now the chest bones have some influence on the hands too, for that reason, when you move your bones you hand lags behind or deform. the reason might be the model itself that is not optimized for rigging or the bone placements, make sure to first check the bone placement before automatic weight painting, and for joints like knees and elbows don't put the bones straight, for example for knees bend them forward a little bit just like the real knee. If you still have problems make sure to let me know.

@@mck3D no. U u derstood none of my message. (Im not a beginner too)

Nice, I mentioned them because those are the reasons for the majority of people, if you can explain to me or send a video of your problem, we might be able to fix that. If it's something you use on a regular basis. But I always suggest to more advanced users to start creating their own rigs even if they are not rigging artists because if you know the limits and possibilities you will create better models for rigging and animations. But I'm totally up to fixing this issue.

@@mck3D i think, that rig needs IK on arms and legs or like that nobody able to snimate or move a knee or an arm

True, for animation having the IK is essential, and almost all the automatic rigs have the IK, without the IK the animators gonna cry.

Yes, rigs for the Unreal Engine are different and more like the MoCap rigs, but it doesn't mean you can not transfer your rig and animations to the UE, it just needs some steps to convert, after all, most great animations are not made in the UE they have custom rigs that BTW are not the same as UE rigs and they make the animations, then they convert them into UE compatible version of the character and import the animations. But this rig is best suited to be used for Blender animations or stuff, not that you can't use it in your games, it's just if you are going to create a game you need a proper rigging artist to rig your character, same as when you can't use the Mixamo for a proper game's animation.

@@mck3D true for porting to UE5 I tried 2 ways 1. Just through rigify -> all custom made animations worked fine, only I couldnt manage foot IK as the armature is different from Manny 2. I tried UEFY plugin but found it unnecessarily complex and couldnt manage it do you know another way?

I'm gonna make a video explaining the process soon, I think it's more convenient than explaining in text. But in the meantime did you check the unreal addon for this? www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/download-our-new-blender-addons

This error happens because the Rigify skeleton changed somehow that Rigify itself can't find or recognize the bones. 1- Maybe you've deleted some bones that should be there in order for Rigify to generate the rig. 2- In the joints area instead of box selecting the joints you've clicked the joint and sometimes there are two joints in the same place and by moving of them out of place instead of moving them together you will get this error. 3- You've brake the parenting between the bones either intentionally or by mistake. 4- You've imported the skeleton from another blender project and want to generate rig for. The easiest solution is to delete the skeleton and add a new one by SHIFT + A, this might seem time consuming to rearrange the rig, but trust me it's much faster than troubleshooting the entire skeleton for the problem, Rigify is an automate rigging plugin and sometimes small things can set it off or even sometimes program bugs can cause it.

This error happens because the Rigify skeleton changed somehow that Rigify itself can't find or recognize the bones. 1- Maybe you've deleted some bones that should be there in order for Rigify to generate the rig. 2- In the joints area instead of box selecting the joints you've clicked the joint and sometimes there are two joints in the same place and by moving of them out of place instead of moving them together you will get this error. 3- You've brake the parenting between the bones either intentionally or by mistake. 4- You've imported the skeleton from another blender project and want to generate rig for. The easiest solution is to delete the skeleton and add a new one by SHIFT + A, this might seem time consuming to rearrange the rig, but trust me it's much faster than troubleshooting the entire skeleton for the problem, Rigify is an automate rigging plugin and sometimes small things can set it off or even sometimes program bugs can cause it.

@@mck3D oh yes true i tried to rig clothes so i deletes foot hand And head bone

Most of the time, the clothes need to be rigged with the character, for that reason, you first rig the character and put the clothes on them, then you will transfer the weight painting from the character into the parts of the clothes that are near the bones. But even if you want to solely rig the clothes you can do without removing the bones, remember to remove the weight of the bones you don't need (in this case the legs or feet) from the clothes so that they don't interfere with the actual rig.

@@mck3D thnx, i tried that but seemed little bit ti complicated for me. So my plan was to give the clothes shape with bones. And then put like head etc on it so it looks like 1 piece

Thank you, also I'll keep that in mind if I wanted to add music, keep the volume down, thanks for reminding me.

Please tell me which version of the Blender are you using?

But most of the time, it's because the Blender don't recognize your rig as a Rigify rig, and see that as a custom rig, one of the reasons might be copying your Rigify rig from another version or project of Blender, but there are some small errors in the process that can make this happen, the fastest solution in my opinion is to remove the rig and start from scratch again, I know that it seems to take a long time, but in most cases it's faster than trying to solve the problem.

@@mck3D i think 4.0

thanks, I just wanted to make sure your Blender version is not too old, please check things that I mentioned in the above comment.

Thank you for your suggestion, I bought a new microphone recently that you can hear in my shorts, sorry that you had to tolerate that.

thank you for your comment, I'm afraid that I didn't get your question, please explain it more.

@@mck3D I did as stated in the video, but it just keeps giving me this error message.

the first thing that comes to my mind is that for some reason you moved one of the joints far from the other one, did you box select the joint and then move them? if it keeps happening you can remove the rig and redo the positioning, sometimes, I do fat fingering stuff and I ruin my rig so if I can't figure out what did I push, I redo the rig.

Which part? It's an easy to use add-on and most of the time there is two reason why your rigging may fail: 1- the model is not optimized for rigging and you can't rig that kind of models in any form 2- you miss a small part of the process and that makes your rigging to fails. Please tell me where you fail and if you do any type of errors either in the main screen of blender or in the footer in bottom-right section of the application.

@@mck3D Thank you for the replying to me🙏 I made a model from Fuse and when I try to apply bones to it. it just dosen't work so I hope you know what I can do

My pleasure, please let me check the fuse models as I'm not familiar with them, I will be back to you.

@@mck3D Thank you so much man I really appreciate you🙏

No problem at all, my pleasure, I will be back to you soon.

sorry for that, I will remember that, and thank you for watching.

Go make ur own vids

@@RolaRU-vid ok my dear

@@RolaRU-vid ❤

Annoying commenter in the comments :>