Hi guys, newbie from Softimage/ Maya, now learning rigging in Blender.
Blender surprise me with many feature which take a lot of setup in Maya/Softimage.
The bendy bone is super nice, taking care of the roll division, bend control, and it can dynamic change the subdivision count! And it is just one bone, single weight painting!
The stacking modifier constraint recalls Softimage rigging.
The ik system recalls my old Lightwave rigging bad memories…IK iteration? will it solve correctly? seems fine.
But it already had a builtin soft stretchy IK ready!
looking into the bone constraints, I can say the element are all ready for a decent rig.
Been Using Gear in Softimage, Mgear in Maya, written custom components for in-house requirement.
Took a look at Rigify, surprisingly it is almost ready except a few touch.
The mechanical part of rigging in blender is ready to go with the current tools I think…
Would be much better if I have a dependency graph, schematic view to look at, a spreadsheet to edit parameters
The most annoying part however is deformation.
Lacking shape linking to separate facial rig from the body rig.
Ans I need to stack up multiple envelope/skinCluster/armature and play with bind matrix to set up tweak layer after deformation.
No clues for now with the edit vs object and edit vs pose mode design in blender.
The worst experience in blender rigging is weight painting. A much better weight painting tool set must be done.
Softimage weight painting experience is the best.
Second to that is ngskin(plugin) in Maya, with the SiWeightEditor (transplant of XSI weight editor by ex-softimage user in Japan) in Maya.
Try production rig from blender cloud, They are way too heavy. ~24fps rig performance/playback is a must for production.
All rig seems to rely on mesh deform/deltamush(smoothCorrective) for the body and bendy bone for facial. Character poly-count is not too high, which means less vertices for weight painting especially true for deform cage.
Is this the reason why this weight painting part is such a case?
Precise weighting is very much needed for movie detail character like the girl from Stylized Character Workflow course.
I am looking forward to see how that character is rigged. The character is well done. The facial topology is of industry standard and I hope it will be rigged in a proper way.
So that’s my feedback on blender rigging at the moment.
I see the future is bright when everything node and animation 2020 is ready, which means a lot of complex rigging and custom deformer will become possible.