TheGatewayOfRealities

Rigging pt2

Added 2018-03-04 04:31:54 +0000 UTC

First of all, thank you for all the support and love you're giving us <3 Quality work needs time to develop, especially when it comes to good animations, and to do good animations, first step is to make a good rig.

Blender is a nice tool.. but it lacks a support for certain features of professional rigs done in programs like Maya. In the previous post about rigging I went though most of the "mechanical" features, but now let's take a look at the UI plugin we custom-made for the animator convenience.

This is a regular "Bone Picker", and its functionality is very simple really: it is an interface panel that lets you select certain animation bones and hide/unhide layers! That's it, and that's all it needs to do! And it is extremely helpful for animators, because most of their job is actually selecting something they want to move.

It was surprising how there was nothing around in Blender that would conveniently offer similar functionality! Some people have done some workarounds, but it is that good to use. Thing is, the UI system of Blender does not allow drawing any custom-shaped buttons, so our addon had to be written using bare openGL, drawing onto the screen directly.

Also, important to point out that it is not just a hard-coded UI for this specific rig! It is a module that has it's own editor where you can draw your custom shapes and bind them to your rigs very easily. You can even put a backdrop image there for extra information and beauty.

All this will be out as a free addon after some further testing, hopefully helping other fellow Blender users animating faster and better in the future :} So yeah, making neat custom tools as we go along with the development!