Auto-Rig Pro is a Blender rig kit developed by Artell and on sale now on Blender Market. Let’s take a quick overview!
There are two versions available for download:
- 3.40 for Blender 2.79
- 3.51 for Blender 2.8x
What is Auto-Rig Pro?
Auto-Rig Pro is an all-in-one solution to rig characters, retarget animations, and provide Fbx export for Unity and Unreal Engine. First developed as my own in-house rigging tool, i’ve released it a few years ago and many new features have been added since then.
Want to try first? Download Mike, free character rig here.
Getting Started with Auto-Rig Pro:
Youtube Channel – Documentation – Frequently Asked Questions
Rig fast with the Smart feature
For humanoid characters, the Smart feature can automatically place the bones to speed up the process, after adding the green markers. The result remains editable.
Non-humanoid characters can also be rigged without the Smart feature, manually (horse, dog…).
Based on a non-destructive workflow, the final rig remains easily editable anytime after its generation. Check the product documentation and the youtube channel for more informations.
Built for performances, allowing fast animation playback.
Character examples: Mike (free), Anna, Kevin, Nina and Alex
Important note about skinning: If possible, use water-tight geometry for best auto-skinning results. Knowing the bases of Blender’s skinning tools, weight painting, to fine tweak the bones influences is recommended. Read the doc for more informations.
If you encounter any bugs please report it. Updates are free and will remain free. Also make sure to read the FAQ and the documentation to solve common issues.
Modular
Customize the rig definition in a few clicks: fingers, wings, toes, spine bones, multiple neck bones, tail, breasts, ears and much more. Duplicate or remove limbs to rig spiders, centaurs… or whatever!
Video tutorial, rig a centaur with the multi-limb feature: Centaur Rig
Customizable UI: fully editable layout, buttons positions, colors, background pictures… The picker panel dynamically updates, so you can select any bone from the separate panel easily.
Remap
The Remap feature allows retargetting of any armature action to another one, with different bone names and bone orientations, supporting imported .bvh/.fbx armatures for example. It’s universal: works with Auto-Rig Pro, Rigify, custom rigs… Define the source armature, the target armature, and the animation will retarget according to the bones names matches and bones original orientation.
It support IK feet, hands for accurate motion tracking, and an interactive offset tool to remap to different characters proportions.
Game Engine Export
Auto-Rig Pro allows export to FBX format (GLTF is being worked on as well) via a dedicated module, to proven engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine.
3 export types: Universal to export a simplified bones hierarchy for any creature, Humanoid for bipeds only, with options for easy retargetting and root motion, and Generic to export the deforming bones and the non-deforming ones if they are parent of the deforming bones.
- Support of multiple twist bones for optimal volume preservation in game engines, where dual quaternions skinning is not possible (top: single twist bone, below: 4 twist bones)
- Unit conversion to initialize the scale transforms values to 1.0 in Unity and Unreal Engine
- Unreal Mannequin compliant: support Mannequin bones hierarchy, bone axes conversion, bones naming
- Automatic A-Pose
- Support full facial rig, and advanced bones. “Twist” mode for secondary controllers, wrapped on bendy-bones for smooth curves effects, leading to 1:1 export compatibility in Fbx format
- Actions are baked to the simplified rig
- Animated shape keys (blend shapes) support
- Selective/multiple action export
- Root motion support
Bring your poses to the next level!
The secondary controllers offer a unique control over the pose. Located all along the limbs, they’re dedicated to fine pose sculpting, cartoon effects, bending, stretching, etc. Three deformations mode in option: Twist (exportable to Fbx and bendy-bones based for best compatibility), Additive (exportable to FBX), Bendy-Bones (Blender only).
Just use them instead of corrective shape keys, or as a complement. Below a typical leg bent before and after tweaking the secondary controllers.
Corrective shape keys can be created easily with a dedicated tool supporting IK-FK bone chains:
Tell Me More!
Extensive list of what the addon has to offer:
- Automatic bone placement solver based on mesh recognition for bipeds characters. Asymmetrical models supported.
- Edit Reference Bones feature to modify the rig anytime you want. No need to redo everything if a bone is not where you want it to be.
- Apply Pose as Rest Pose feature to quickly change the rest pose of the character, aligning reference bones on it and applying armature modifiers in a single click
- Modular: only rig what you need. Fingers, toes, ears, breast, adjustable amount of spine, neck, twist bones, tail, and neck bones… Duplicate, remove limbs to rig creatures with multiple arms and legs.
- Fingers auto-rotation option: bend when scaling the first phalange, pre-defined fist pose
- Easy controller shape edition
- Bone picker: Can be turned on/off, import/export presets. Customizable.
- Colors customization
- Cartoon compliant: stretchy spine, legs, arms…
- IK-FK snap autokey compliant, snaps properly when unlocking all the leg/forearm rotation axis
- IK-FK controllers auto hide
- Hybrid IK pole / IK arrow vector
- 2 or 3 bones IK chains for legs
- Knees and elbows pinning
- Head rotation locked or free
- Bend all fingers in one click (fingers grasp), fist pre-defined pose, auto rotation of fingers phalanges from scale
- IK/FK eyes
- Auto-eyelid rotation
- Multiple Child-Of constraints support for the IK hands and feet to change their parent space any time (e.g. if the character is driving a car, hands on the wheel, then grab the car door)
- Complete set of secondary controllers for fine pose sculpt
- Advanced facial setup with automated placement
- Improved skinning based on Blender’s heatmaps. Auto-splitting of multiple elements + voxelization. Compliant with the Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning addon.
- Shape keys drivers creation tool
- Game engines support, FBX: Unity – Unreal Engine. Generic, Humanoid and Universal rig type
- Bone remapper to retarget any armature action to another one, with different bone names and bone orientations. IK support. BVH, FBX files compliant, e.g. Mixamo animations.
- Compliant with X-Muscle System for realistic muscles simulation
- By buying this addon you support my work and the Blender foundation, its developers financially. A part of each sale is donated to them. It’s worth a big thank you from the open source community, helping Blender remaining free and accessible for everyone! And obviously you ensure the funds for this addon next new features, bugfix. I’m making my best to constantly improve the beast, based on users requests and my own ideas. Have quick look at the release log below. You receive a notification when the addon is updated, and download it for free.
Updates:
Make sure to uninstall the current addon before installing the new one and restart blender.
–[3.51.11]–
New/improved:
- Smart: Now supports characters models with feet floating above the floor
- Rig: Set A-Pose: The fingers rotation now perfectly match the mannequin fingers
- Rig: Custom speed factor for the eyelid up and down motion
- Rig: Custom speed factor for the c_foot_roll_cursor controller
- Rig: Align c_root_master in option when Match to Rig, to allow custom placement
- Rig: Align c_skulls bone-in option when Match to Rig, to allow custom placement
- Rig: Align eyelid bones in option when Match to Rig, to allow custom placement
- Smart: Second voxelization method in option, may help the finger detection or not depending on the hand topology.
Fixed:
- Rig: the feet bone rotation could be incorrect when the feet bones were not perfectly straight, due to incorrect bone roll evaluation. A more efficient method is now used to set it
- Picker: the Main and Secondary buttons could be hidden, ensure at least one of their layer is now displayed
–[3.50.23]–
New/improved:
- Rig: Custom Limbs are in! The selected bones can be saved as a custom limb so that they can be easily added in any armature later. This is the first phase of the implementation, only custom bones are fully supported. Auto-Rig Pro limbs (arms, legs…) as custom limbs will be supported later in the second phase of the implementation.
- Skin: Multiple corrective shape keys per bones are now supported
- Export: Selective action export using checkboxes in option
- Rig: The custom shape edition has been improved to ensure the edited custom shape is always linked to the selected bone
- Export: Allows custom bones export as masters controller (parent of the “root.x” bone)
- Export: For humanoid export, allows location values different from 0 for the spine, neck and head bones
Fixed:
- Smart: Error when setting facial
- Rig: Some sub-limbs (toes) had missing custom shapes
- Rig: the picker buttons were set in one layer only
- Rig: Bones used for the rotation of corrective shape keys don’t inherit scale anymore from their parent since it was leading to incorrect rotation evaluation
- Rig: Some picker buttons were locked after applying changes
- Rig: Set all picker buttons in layer 0
- Rig: Removed the Reset All button from the picker, since it’s already included in the Rig Main properties interface
- Smart: The fingers detection was broken with the Blender 2.83 update
- Remap: Unbinding could lead to an error if the rig has animation data
- Export: Ensure animation export without errors in case meshes have multiple armatures modifiers
- Export: Spline limbs could be incorrectly parented
–[3.49.14]–
New/improved:
- Preferences: The addon main UI and tools UI (IK-FK snap…) can now be displayed in a custom tab name
- Smart: Knees are now in line with the feet, for better legs rotation
- Rig: To visualize the IK direction of reference bones, a line can now be displayed in option for the selected bones chain
- Rig: New armature presets can now be added in the “armature_presets” directory of the addon, they are loaded into the list on Blender startup
- Rig: New “Roll Cursor Distance” to adjust the visual c_foot_roll_cursor distance from the foot
- Rig: The hand fist controller now allows negative scale values to spread the fingers, and limit constraints have been added [0.5 – 1.5] scale range
- Rig: The stretch length default value of feet and arms is now 1.0
- Export: The shaky bones issue should now be gone with a better evaluation of bone matrices and rotations
- Export: Since Unity can support twist bones using scripts, twist bones export for humanoid is now added in the interface
Fixed:
- Skin: If “Split Parts” was disabled, two armature modifiers could be added
- Rig: The ChildOf constraints of the arm IK pole were not reset when Match to Rig, leading to an offset when snapping IK-FK
- Rig: Setting the arm ik pole distance could fail
- Rig: The hand fist constraints was missing from “c_thumb1_base”
- Smart: Cancelling facial setup could lead to an error
- Rig: Disabling facial bones was leading to an error since the latest update
- Rig: Non-parallel or not vertically aligned eyes were not properly aligned after Match to Rig. This is now fixed by default, however, there is an option in the “Legacy” menu for backward-compatibility with older files.
Source: BlenderMarket
