[Solved] Auto Rig Pro for Blender

I'd like to know if someone here tried AutoRig Pro for blender and what your experience was. Mostly because I'm eyeing the addon, as as making rigs by hand is not fun and Rigify does not perfcetly match my needs.

I think somebody recommended it, and I believe that was @MadeFromPolygons , who, as far as I can tell, was previously nicknamed GameDevCouple.

So? Thoughts/Opinions?

 

That was me, and yes its absolutely amazing. Its our go-to rigging add-on and greatly improves and speeds up rigging workflows. It also allows you to make some awesome custom GUI controllers very easily too.

We found that the actual auto-rigging it provides is the best in blender available, obviously they still sometimes need some manual adjustments afterwards but it massively speeds up all the work. I cannot recommend it enough, and the creator often donates to the blender fund so by purchasing you are giving back to the blender community anyway

 

Thanks.

Few questions, though:

Have you tried using this on low poly models? As in extremely low poly models.

Does it have the usual stuff like pole targets for elbow/knees and IK widget bones out of the box?
It seems that it does, but I'm still having some doubts for some reason. And setting up this stuff is the most time consuming task when rigging from scratch.

Overall it looks like I'll need to buy it along with scrivener.

 

Hey no problem.

So regarding low poly the answer is yes (I have used it on synty models for example which are basically minecraft box people).

Also regarding pole targets for elbows etc and IK widget bones, yes it has it out of the box. I cant remember if you have to do something to set it up / turn it on, but it definately comes with that functionality (and I agree it is time consuming if this is not included.

I think it will be a great addition to your blender toolset. I would say it is proably in the top 3 most important add ons to have for anybody using blender in game dev

 

Hey,
I'm using AutoRig Pro and happy with it too. I haven't used it with low poly models but don't see a something going wrong with it.
@MadeFromPolygons already pointed out its great features.
I want say that its author is responsive and always looking for ways to improve it.

 

Paying for an addon for an FOSS program sounds counter-intuitive to me, but hey, I'm going to give it a try. I've used Rigify for 2 projects, and while it has its problems, I thought it was manageable. I'm hoping to be blown away at AutoRig Pro.

 

The problem with rigify is that it is geared towards cinematic animation. Their default rigs have a lot of stuff I don't need (and don't want), and adding your own templates is inconvenient.

It is manageable, yes, but needs an improvement.

 

Alright, I went ahead and bought it. I'll probably post about it later once I had a chance to properly play with it.

 

@neginfinity How did your experience with AutoRig Pro went?

 

It is not perfect, but it works.

The only caveats I found are:

1. The Rig generates twist bones. This isn't a problem for unity right now, but for a low poly model, I'd prefer to have an option to switch off generation of those. Such option doesn't seem to exist. At least I haven't found it. There's always at least one twist bone.
2. It doesn't come with "Weapon" bones or "Holster" bones which could serve as attachment points in the game. Actually you can't exactly freely combine hand-crafted IK chains with it. But this is an uncommon request, as far as I know.

Aside from that, it works as advertised. The rig is solid, the picker is good, and you mostly can rig a humanoid in a few clicks.

 

Heh. Thanks for the review, @neginfinity.

I actually finally bought it, but haven't had a chance to try it yet. I figured if it supports Blender dev, I might as well. I realize for my project at this point that, while rigify has its complications, I already spent loads of time on my pipeline to clean it up, and export/import to Unity fairly seamlessly. Changing it at this point means I'll be re-learning the nuances of ARP, re-integrating it into my pipeline, and generally worrying about breaking S*** when my pipeline has been working for years now. I hope to review it eventually, but I'll have to wait for a future time.

 

There shouldn't be a lot of nuances, to be honest. The plugin comes with very convenient "Export FBX" button which bypasses usual export dialog and checks if you accidentally enabled "Preserve Volume", and you should be able to get hang of it in a single evening. Plus for humanoids it positions bones automatically. Well, semi-automatically, as you still need to tell where feet and shoulders are.

Speaking of rigify, I gave up on it. I mean, it feels like rigify had the right idea in the beginning, but currently it is so far removed from what I typically want (plus there's that trouble with widget bones), that I stopped using it and was rigging models by hand instead. Meaning ARP is definitely an improvement.

If you want a test without worrying about wrecking your stuff, you could just grab MakeHuman, have it generate a model without bones (their rigs are awful, and when they got rid of mhx things didn't exactly improve), then have it rigged in ARP.

Spoiler

^^^ That model was just rigged with ARP without any adjustments.

Basically the only strange thing I found is that knee IK targets are parented to feet IK targets. Because when I was doing it myself I was parenting them to root. But that works anyway.

It is also worth mentioning that I don't deal with faces because I'm usually interested in lowpoly.

 

Dealing with blender's internal rigging system is fine if I just want to slam out a non-humanoid as fast as possible, but rigify has otherwise been a total disaster whenever I've tried to use it. If the output plays nice with what VR Chat's API and mecanim in general like then I may have to check it out. I'll gladly shell out $50 CDN for something that even slightly resolves these issues

 

Well, I made two VRChat avatars with it without any issues. VRChat uses mecanim, so the output is mecanim compatible. The hierarchy looks like this. It is very clean.

Spoiler

No widget bone nonsense, as you can see. It also supports exporting to unreal:

Spoiler

I had zero problems with rigging. I mean I vagually remember weight painting (for low poly I prefer to weightpaint by hand), but that's the extent of it. I just plugged the unmodified ouput into unity and that was it.

One minor nitpick: Rigify is technically an addon. And not the internal rigging system. The internal system is the one where you create bones by hand. (I hate secondary targets...)

 

That's all great to hear. I'll grab that ASAP.

Fair, either way I hate that it's basically not at all supported on the Unity front and the only solutions to solve the workflow barrier for it specifically are broken in the latest Blender releases (the free ones at least)

edit: auto rig pro is some real wizard magic S***, what the F***. this was made by a wizard

 

The biggest thing about the prebuilt rigs is that it doesn’t allow that much customization.. Yes it’s easy to bang out a rig but if you want to add bones or make adjustments you have to do it a certain way.. I’m not sure if you guys have looked into “Rig Anything With Rigify” but hear me out.. I set up a rig in less than 30 minutes and can improve and iterate on it non destructively. Also since I make all my characters in the same pose I never have to create a new rig I can just keep duplicating the same rig with the same animations etc.. Now ARP has the retargeting feature which is CLUTCH but also not well documented.. A lot of the tutorials are super old as well.. I’ve had the plug-in since version 3.2 and I’ve only used it a few times.. Honestly learning how to rig from scratch was the best decision I’ve made.. Removes the guess work. I know exactly what’s wrong with my rigs and also how to fix it..

Imma keep it a stack what turned me off was not having the ability to create new bones for weapons. Also I still don’t know how to turn on the IK for the arms.. lol it’s a good add on for sure but rigify is free and my god is it GREAT! Once you understand the building blocks you can legit rig anything and make it game ready very fast. not ARP fast but fast enough !

 

With ARP you can set up a rig in 30 seconds. Then you can alter it non-destructivetly at any point.

Additionally, after using rigify for a long time, I concluded that rigify is garbage. It seriously doesn't work well with multiple rig character in the same file, creates insane amount of helper widget bones, and that requires babysitting and cleanup. It is bloated.

Builtin rigging system is better than rigify, however, setting up constraints and secondary targets is royal pain in the arse, and there isn't a quick way to configure an arm, for example. So while ARP is not perfect, it is definitely an improvement over rigify.

 

Has anybody here have experience with using auto-rig's humanoid export? im having an issue where my eyelid goes 10 miles to the left and really droopy shoulders, but looks perfectly fine via regular fbx export. it could be just me.