One of our two tech goals for tube is to have a nice autorigging system for blender. Today I demo the beginning of such a system ( called rigamarule ) which is actually a rig-retargeting system that can work with (or without) etch-a-ton (in blender 2.49).
After recording, I realized I hadn’t shown what rigamarule is, so I made this little addendum for the curious:
There’s actually one small last script, dr_taggert.py , that tags each bone with it’s bone ID, and can optionally clear it.. sometimes, dr taggert likes to segfault.
All the scripts are GPL licensed, and I’ll release them after they’ve gone through some milestone tests.
High resolution .ogg video available here and here.
Oh, in case you didn’t notice, I’m using the video element in html 5 with a flash fallback for older browsers… thanks to all who helped me earlier 
Wow, that sounds so practice, it could be more easy to make a rig.
Yeah, I notice you are using HTML5 video etiquette.
Vaya! eso si que suena practico, hara mas facil hacer un rig.
Si, me di cuenta que estaban usando la etiqueta HTML5 de video.
It does make things faster- for the main character I will be using it for fingers, arms and legs. We’re also going to use it for simple full-body rig templates for some other projects.
Yeah, the html 5 is nice, only problem now is that not all browsers are supporting it + not all browsers are supporting the same codec.. would be nice if everyone shipped with .ogg support.
That is way cool. I can’t stop thinking about its potential ubiquity with Blender 2.5.
Thanks Mike – my hope that 2.5 would allow this to be completely automatic (for the rigger) and much more user friendly (for the template creator/rigger )
PS- this is going to affect my workflow quite a bit- now I’m basically going to “templatize” just about every bone chain, to save drudgery when rigging future rigs. Should speed up rig creation quite a bit.
Hey Bassam, amazing news! Thanks, man! Where can we found those scripts? Cheers
hia mangojambo! great work in apricot!
these scripts will be released right here on this blog, stay tuned- I just have to do some more fine-tuning and tests to make them ‘user friendly’ and to write some docus for other riggers/scripters users.
sometime next week is likely!
[...] can be remedied by adding appropriate rules. You can see a preview movie of the scripts in action here. Rigamarule is in use for the tube project (for which it was developed) and for the Richmond 48 [...]
Hi Bassam, i just found out about this from you post in the Python API Mailing list. I had my own script for realigning bones etc, but it was all hardcoded pain in the butt. I just tested rigamarule and will try it on my own complrex rig. Huge thanks for developing this!
hi IvoG/Loolarge! awesome, let me know if there are any questions. The current state of the script is a bit early, but you should be able to extend it (fairly) easily by adding rules to marulez.py.
Just copy one of the existing rules, change the name, and do something different with the args.
One interesting thing: I’ve found that changes to marulez.py don’t ‘register’ unless I quit and restart blender after saving it.. not sure what’s up with that.
hopefully we can get an svn going and make this a good project for the future.
the idea seems so great, do you plan to remaake these scripts for the cyrrent 2.5 versions? it should be nice to test it and give some feedback perhaps…
Hi Spirit! look for a post soon! indeed, they are working for 2.5 currently, and I’ve been using them the past two weeks (indeed, working better than in 2.4)
[...] finaled, too much can change in those small details. The rig itself is quite ‘smart’ as Rigamarule has been ported by myself, Daf and Josh to Blender 2.5. As a result, moving a joint can auto-update [...]