If you want to join and help out here in the Animation & Rigging module, post here! Let us know what subjects you’re interested in, your skills, and how you think you can help out. Or just say hi.
For more info about the module, like the who-is-who, links to communication channels, projects, etc, check Animation & Rigging Module.
Hi!
I would definitely be interested in helping out in the design of Blender’s future node based rigging workflow
I’m a Character TD at Humain where I spend most of my time building high end FACS based face rigs for Games and VFX
I’ve got experience with rigging in Blender, Maya “vanilla”, Maya’s new Bifrost node graph and Unreal’s Control Rig.
Over the years, I’ve built and maintained a variety of different modular rigging systems and have grown ideas for what I would like a modern rigging workflow to look like.
Hi Sybren, I’d like to help out with the rigging side of things. I believe Luciano and others have the animation side well covered, and I might not be a high end TD, I have some years’ experience rigging a variety of characters in Blender, and am familiar with some of its limitations. I’m not sure I can help out technically, but I can definitely testify to the needs of riggers, how the toolset usually falls short, and what we could do to improve it.
I’m sure we’ll see a lot of more capable people jumping on this ship, but if all else fails, I can always try to help.
Here’s an animation reel https://vimeo.com/361045291
Full disclosure, this is far from Blender-only -and not just my rigs either.
Cheers,
Hadrien
Hi!
I’m an animator and rigger at Airship Syndicate working for 15-ish years primarily in games. I’ve got experience animating in Max, Maya and XSI. Rigging experience is mostly in Max.
I never quite got the hang of Blender well enough to do any meaningful rigging or animation with it, I used it to learn python and script operators with though.
Not sure how much help I could be but I’d be happy to help if I can. At the very least it’d be fun to watch development of this module.
Hey folks! So many responses, nice!
To see what the module is working on, check the work board. The column “Short-Term Tasks” is what currently is the focus on of the A&R module. This Thursday we’ll have another module meeting, feel free to join in!
Hey I’m a rigging artist, animator and TD from Maya. I can code in python and I know some C++ from Maya’s API building. I have 10+ years experience in the industry. How do I get involved with the community? I would like to be able to build tools and improve rigging and animation in blender. I recently fixed a bug in a source code for mGear and would like to get involved from stuff away from Autodesk. Any responses are welcome.
Hi @dew!
That sounds great. I think the first port of call would be to get Blender sources and make your first own build. This is documented in the New Developer Intro section of the wiki. If it’s unclear or you get stuck somewhere, that’s fine, pop over to the #blender-builds channel on Blender Chat and there’ll be people to help you out.
The best way to get your feet wet is to take a look at the Animation & Rigging workboard. I think the T83068: Motion Paths: Refresh all task could be a good first one to tackle.
Be sure to come and hang out in the #animation-module channel on Blender Chat.
Hello everyone I am newbie here and I am glad to be part of this community and I think there is lot of things to learn and gain some knowledge.
Welcome @shownne!
Come lurk in the #animation-module channel on Blender Chat, there are plenty of knowledgeable people there to learn from.
That channel is really for Blender development itself. Everybody is welcome to join in, just to lurk or to actually join in discussions for shaping the future of Blender. If you have questions about using Blender, the #animation channel may be a better one for you.
Hi Sybren and all,
I have been doing rigging for the past 20+ years, mostly in Maya and some of it in proprietary software.
During this time I jumped back and forth between cartoony rigging for animated feature films and vfx rigging on feature films as well as some commercials, shorts, music videos, rides - pretty much everything except games.
My main focus and areas of interest is developing rigs and rigging pipelines, coming up
with intuitive workflows that are focused on efficiency and easy to use and writing tools around that
(I have been writing various rig builder tools over the past 15 years). (Mostly MEL and Python)
More recently I have been getting my feet wet with c++ and Maya Api writing custom nodes
and simple deformers for Maya.
Even more recently I have been exploring rigging in Blender a bit.
I think there are some nice ideas in there. 
At the same time it has also been a little bit frustrating at times, which might be related
to certain workflows that I am used to from other packages, for example having a node-based
rigging system, which is why I am curious and interested in the everything nodes - project, and
what this could potentially mean for rigging in Blender.
Welcome @nsanghra! I really would like to see a node-based rigging system as well. Blender’s constraint system is getting quite complex, and hard to update wihout breaking existing rigs. I think it’s a good idea to first let the Geometry Nodes system evolve a bit more, so that the node-based evaluation gets more mature. It then shouldn’t be too hard (always the optimist!) to design a good node-based constraint system.
Witam wszystkich. Jestem tu nowicjuszem i cieszę się, że jestem częścią tej społeczności i myślę, że jest wiele rzeczy do nauczenia się i zdobycia pewnej wiedzy.
będę się przyglądał z zaciekawieniem i uczył od mistrzów
Grew from a hobby into professioinal 3D 15+y ago, slowly switched to Blender 8-10 years ago.
Digging the deeper end of rigging for a few years and wrote my first ground collision rigging addon a year ago.
Like @nsanghra said, nodes is what seems to be of ultimate potential. But I’d like to add, that just being able to see hierarchy/constraint dependency in a node-like fashion would already greatly improve efficiency (chasing loops and the time it takes to explore complicated structures).
But by no means I’m advocating for anyone to just jump to it, as everything being done here is needed and of inspiring quality as is!
Hi!
I just wanted to say hi and tell you a bit about what I do.
I am a Technical Artist at TaleWorlds and I am currently spearheading the transition of our entire 3D art/animation pipeline from Autodesk to Blender by the end of the year. I’ve got experience in HLSL, C#, C++, and python. I’m currently working on solutions for our animators so that they move their workflow from MotionBuilder to Blender more gracefully.
Hi Dr. Stüvel!
my name is Damiano, I’m a software engineer with a good experience in programming with C++ and Python. In my free time I work on my 3D modeling and animation projects, powered by the best software ever, Blender!
For several months I have been working on a new character creator for Blender to use in my projects, and I have also worked on some new functionalities for Blender that I would like to contribute in the coming weeks.
Hi Damian, welcome!
That might be nice to demo some time at an Animation & Rigging meeting?
It’s great that you want to help out. Be sure to talk first, code second, though. It has happened in the past that someone worked for a long time to finish some functionality, only to hear that it wouldn’t fit with the design principles of Blender. Communication with the rest of the Blender team is important if you want to ensure your time is spent going the right direction. Pop over to #animation-module on Blender Chat and talk about your idea, or post about it here on devtalk (and also plonk a link to your post in the Blender Chat channel, because there are simply more eyes on Blender Chat than here on devtalk).
If a demo could be useful, I would really like to do that, but I have still some weeks of work ahead of me before I’m confident enough to show it.
The character has an unconventional (and rather advanced) rig, thus it should be interesting for the community to know how it’s done.
Well, I have done some modifications of the source code in the past mainly to learn the Blender codebase, and secondly to see if what I needed for my character creator could be implemented, so if these modifications won’t end up in master that’s not a big deal 
Anyway, I will start by creating a thread on devtalk to see if there is any interest in the first addition that I would like to contribute.
Hi @sybren
Saw you on the Sprite Fright post party stream and you mention wanting to welcome new developers. I’m a software engineer (of 30+ years) working in C/C++ for all of those, and so on and so forth. Always keeping my hands in the code, but also have been lead architect for large engineering teams.
Anyhow nowadays I’m lead artist for my little game company, and would like to contribute back to FOSS (I’ve been a lead developer on other open source projects in the past). So I’m looking for an angle into Blender to get to know her, maybe A&R is a good home?
Starting with an abandoned patch sounds like an easy way to start slinging code, any suggestions welcome.
Dan