@@Mo-go7ph hmmmm, I don't use Unity regularly so hard to say. Are you sure it is deleted? Sometimes the representation of bones is just different between 3D software but the effect is the same.
I've been completely bumped after I spent weeks on animations only to put them on Unreal and they completly broke. Tried every export settings I could find, to no avail, and I almost gave up on my game entirely. You are the only that talked about baking the animations to a game ready rig, I swear. You saved my game, thank you.
Been watching your Blender rigging tutorials for a couple of weeks now to get comfortable switching from Maya and I have the utmost respect for you. The educational content and resources you provide are gold, Thank you so much! (And you even provide this add on for free for those who cannot afford the purchase *mindblown* you are amazing man)
I don't want it... I NEED IT!!! WOW! This is a marvelous tool!! 🙀 - Question: If I set up extra bones in Rigify (or rig bone types additionally than the ones by default, and their layer orders and visibility) will the addon still work? Great video!!
It Should work, as long as the bone you want to extract is a deform bone, it will just grab it Simplified explanation on what the Addon Basicly Do: - Make A copy of the Control Bone - Remove All other Bone other than deform bone (unless you change some settings) - Remove Drivers, Constraints, Custom Properties (and some other clean up that I might missed) - Constraint the Deform bone to the Control Bone So Generally It should just work
Yep, Rigify rigs, even customized ones, should work great with the addon. As Blenderboi said it just extracts the deform bones and constrains them to the Control rig. You can do more complex stuff like extracting the select bones. A lot of customization is possible.
@@CGDive Fantastic! I feel everyone downloading this addon will unlock PREMIUM content using Blender (if Blender was a videogame)- Great work, you guys!
A problem solved for me before I ever had to suffer it. Thank you so much, to you and Blenderboi. Great work! It even looks like it'll work with strange armatures made with Rigify, like those Frankenstein rigs you mentioned in your other videos. Makes me excited to get into animating my indie game again.
You taught me how to rig and make my rigs come to life. Yes I've had issues that I've learned how to deal with the NLA editor and baking issues. I definitely need to support you because even though things like Auto-Rig solves these issues, you do everything with an optional price tag which is awesome for people without the budget. I hope good things come your way man. I was wondering, does this generate a control rig if you only have the deform rig and does it have FK/IK switching or do I have to make all that?
Hey thanks, man! The addon doesn't generate a control rig. It can only do the opposite: generate a deform rig from an existing control rig. If you want to generate a control rig, I recommended Rigify :)
Haven't seen it. Best approach is to submit this in the issues section on GitHub. The developer will respond. It could be a bug and they may fix it thanks to your report,
thank you for this!! made me realize, to get my rigify rig exporting properly, i needed to check in GLTF export settings > Data > Armature > Export Deformation Bones Only as well as Flatten Bone Hierarchy and now it works! The animations were deforming oddly after export to godot as glb/reimport to blender and now it works after this!
Hello First, your addon is incredible. I can finally use meta rig controls easily for creating game assets! I have finally a good workflow However, I simply would ask you something: how about the root bone? I can animate the root control, but cannot export it for using root motion (on Unity) All the root control keyframess are baked on DEF bones, there is no root bones on the game rig
is parenting bones necessary? if yes, why would i need to do that though? because logically the animation are made using the control rig so the baked animation in the game rig won't break or go nuts
I've spent 2 evenings watching most of your videos on animation and preparing a game-ready rig - that was very interesting. Thanks! And it's so great, that I understand what this add-on does under the hood. Amazing work!
Addon has been working great and I love it. No idea how to submit a bug report, since there isn't a repository or a developer email that I could see on addon pages or readme. At least in the beta version for 4.0, I get an error line 1117 of the GRT_Action_Bakery python script which causes action baking to fail. This happens when not all elements are visible in my view layer in the scene currently, which is surprising to me. I suspect it's specifically the visibility of the control and game rig, but don't want to overspecify as I haven't thoroughly tested. So, I'll be enabling visibility for everything in my scene temporarily whenever I bake actions. I doubt that is a strict function of blenders internals, unless blender truly obscures logical elements that are visually hidden, so hopefully that can be fixed in a future version. If anyone knows the appropriate address to forward bug reports to, please let me know so I can do better than a youtube comment, figured it might be good to put in here in case someone else encounters the same issue.
Your videos are unparalleled! To the point, precise, and honest when Blender does 'Blender' things for which there is no explanation. I'm exploring Game Rig Tools as an additional tool in my arsenal to get content into Unreal. Money is tight right now, but you've more than earned it from me. I'll get it to you. Thank you for all you do! p.s. ~ I've become more comfortable posing, working with model rigs, and with enough time could put together a solid animation. For one character. But that single character, the hands still go through the rest of the body mesh (there's no 'volume' to the mesh, no 'skin' as a boundary limitation despite the obvious appearance of, well, skin..?). Overall, single character isn't too difficult with some practice. Two or more characters in the same fight scene --> hands go through faces, kicks bury shin-deep in stomachs, on and on. I can precisely animate to the smallest fraction each action and reaction but there's no way professionals are working like that. I'm clearly missing something. Collisions, yes, but I'm wondering if there's a combination of techniques that allow for more of a 'flow', where after some setup and fine-tuning it's more 'natural' for character A, B, C.. to effect the other character? Obviously, still needs animation, but for example, A throws a punch at B, connects in the jaw, and character B's rig (at least) moves with the punch WHILE the two meshes are connected (if post-contact automated 'drag' is possible that would be, perfect lol). Just my own struggles but maybe a video idea or two in there. Thank you!
Hey, thanks for the good words! As for your question... in fact, professionals are animating like this. There is no volume to the digital character, you have to make it appear as if there is. I am sure the future will bring new features that will make digital characters more "physical". But for now, there isn't or if there is, it would be very difficult to set up.
Am I correct in thinking that I must create my own Metarig using Rigify chains. And that that skeleton must not have hip bones if it is going to Unreal. Then generate the Control rig in Rigify -> Generate Rig, and weight paint. Then in GRT Generate Game Rig to get an exportable skeleton that can be retargeted in UE? Simply using the Rigify rig with hip bones, instead of building one without hip bones, will issue in a Game rig that has hip bones, in other words. And hip bones cannot be easily retargeted in UE.
If you add a standard Blender Rigify rig, convert it into a control rig and weight a mesh to it, then you convert that control rig to a game ready rig using Game Rig Tools, you end with a game ready rig that has hip bones, with weights on those hip bones. You do not get the rig illustrated in the above video. And I do not see how a bone in the UE rig is supposed to map onto two hip bones during retargeting in UE. Therefore it seems that the rig you have used in the video is a hand crafted Rigify rig without hip bones.
@@stephenjones8114 Ah, yeah. I probably removed the hip bones since they don't have any functionality and just create slightly better automatic weights. There is not much hand-crafting involved. I just deleted them from the metarig and generated the rig.
@@CGDive Long way round, but am building rig from Rigify bits and pieces as you illustrated. Excellent tutorials. Actually maybe I could bend your ear. The problem seems to be workflow. Getting animations out of UE, into Blender, onto a rig, finessing animations for that rig in Blender, and exporting them back into UE. Human Generator produces excellent mesh. Clothes can be hacked out of that mesh. Autorig pro produces fast rig, and weights it well. But retargeting is fraught. Don't know whether to retarget twist or IK. The autorig naming convention is confusing. Rigify produces good rigs. But retargeting via Rokoko is little better than Autorig. Neither seem to support finessing animations. Fixing arms so they don't cut through the body for example. In fact there is little on the net that walks through how to dig into an existing animation, strip the graph editor into the relevant parts required to make adjustments, and how to incorporate that fix into the existing animation. Which kind of leads me back to Game Rig Tools. A Rigify rig can be exported to UE with animations using this tool. That part is covered. Slapping a Human Generator mesh onto a Rigify rig is not a problem. I believe Autorig Pro can retarget from UE rig to Rigify rig. A Rigify rig has the controls to adjust animations once retargeted. The outstanding issue is the graph editor. Like I say, I have watched your tutorials and they are excellent. But I still have this issue.
Thank you so much for the video and the addon. Looks amazing and I will definitely try it. Also big thumbs up for the pay-as-much-as-you-can approach. You guys are awesome!
If you have a face rig in your control armature, you can make it game-ready. In the addon files there are videos and I show one workflow for the Rigify face rig.
UE 2 Rigify is a bit hard to get into but it can be powerful. As for our stuff, also check out the "Unreal Module" which allows you to rig characters with Mannquin/Manny skeleton th-cam.com/video/U23WyAd8o_8/w-d-xo.html
Although I'm only starting my journey as a game developer outside of a GCS, I know now that the sky is the limit, and the content you provide - videos and addon recommendations - are invaluable resources in the way of animation in game development. As things are for myself financially, I can't give back to the people who give so much expecting nothing in return, but I will when I can. Pinky Promise!
How can I get back to the control rig, I see, that whenever i bake, all my items that used to be armatured to the CTRL rig now are armatured to deform after baking anims to nla. I don't wanna change manually each asset back to the correct rig
At 21:36 it is explained why the game rig and control rig become disconnected. To connect them again simply select the Game Rig (NOT the control rig!) and press the Unmute button above "Generate Game Rig".
You can use Rigify, Auto-Rig Pro, or create it yourself Rigify videos th-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJv68SSdwxip33M7snakl6Dx.html Auto-Rig Pro Videos th-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJuHJFQgb4altQWs-RCKA7Bq.html I don't have much on manual rigging but there is plenty on the internets :)
Exporting can be specific to the game engine. I have videos for UE4, Unity and Godot. Check the playlists. Generally you export FBX and import it in your engine.
I was just about to rig my most complex model yet and then try bringing my work from Blender to Unreal for the first time and I'm so glad I found this in time. I didn't know a Rigify rig by itself wasn't going to translate well into game engines, so this is gonna be a life saver for me. Thank you so much!!!
I just came across this video and i am definitely gonna purchase it. I do have a question. After rigging a character, will the body be compatible with adding a metahuman head to it? Ive seen videos now on how you can add their heads on a properly rigged body. So will this software do the trick? Thanks!
@@CGDive Oh thanks, and yeah, this plugin just saved me a lot of headaches. Thanks again! A guy setup a control rig and the hands were decoupled....that really gave me a headache trying to figure out how to fix it without messing that up. I was about ready to give up on it when I seen this video.
I can't say for sure, sorry. If they can import a generalized rig, then yes. If they need a highly specific one, then probably yes but with special tweaks that you have to do yourself.
ca we add custom bones that are attached to the mannequin but not skinned to anything? I tried this and when exporting to UE5 the skeleton wasn't recognized.
The addon is not a dedicated UE tool and it does not make a mannequin compatible skeleton. It makes a general game-ready rig which can be used in UE or any engine but compatibility with a specific standard is not guaranteed.
I'm having issues with baking the animations. It wont bake more than one at a time and to me it seems its somewhat random what animation it does bake. It does make NLA tracks with keyframes at the start n the end but no other keyframes in-between at all. I cant seem to figure out why. I've tried messing with the settings of the GRT action bakery but no luck. Anyone had a similar issue or has a potential solution?
I think you posted this on discord as well right? Let's keep talking there. From what I gather, you are not using the recommended workflow so it may not be considered an issue/bug.
In the downloads, there should be multiple files. Pay attention to their names: the blender version they are meant to work with is included in the name. So for Blender 3.3 get Game-Rig-Tools-3.3x. The GRT 3.3 version should work with Blender 3.4 as well. Let me know if it doesn't.
What if animations are already working on unity with a dummy I had and I just want to replace the character with the game rig would that be possible without loosing the animations?
I can't say for sure based just on what you said. All I can say is ... it should be there :) Make sure you are using the appropriate GRT version for your Blender version. If you can share a screenshot or video what you see, that could be helpful!
Hello, is it possible to utilise this for root motion as well? My character moves forward with the root bone translating, can this be transferred into the game rig?
The addon doesn't have any dedicated tools for that but if you add a root bone in your game armature and constrain it to the root of your control rig, it will be exported and you can use it in your game engine. When you extract the game rig there are options and you can specify what is being exported. If you choose "Deform and Selected" and just select the root bone, that should extract the bones you want.
Hello, Why "constraint to armature name" doesn't clear the constraints? It'll add the desired one, but it will not clear the constraints before the new one. Maybe I am doing something wrong?
can anyone please help me, i'm converting the rigiffy rig to game rig using this addon but the newly created rig-deform bones are not parented properly (as mentioned in the video) but the face bones are all serparate and i don't know where should i parent them, any help?
For the face bones, I recommend to just select all of them and parent them to the head. Keep in mind that the Rigify face is quite complex and not necessarily meant for games.
Hi, sorry if this is a silly question, I'm a bit new to this whole process. I'm currently creating characters using Character Creator 4 and I import them into Blender using their CC Pipeline addon. This addon also includes a button called "Rigify" which creates a really nice and detailed rig. My understanding is that your addon can convert this rig into a game ready one so that it can be imported into game engines like Unreal 5. I didn't see any examples however for game ready face rigs, are those not supported or how does that work? Thank you!
@@CGDive thank you for your reply! I purchased the addon and have been playing around with it the past couple of days. The videos provided are pretty easy to understand, however I'm still not able to import the rigged character into a standard UE5 Third Person project and replace the default mannequin with my character mesh and have it use the same walking/running animations that the mannequin comes with. Do you happen to have any recommendations on what video to watch for this last step? Thank you!
@@Pulciu you probably want the Unreal module of GRT for that. Check out this playlist, all the info you need is there th-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJv6Hd5wGEiHxpYpzAMJPnsB.html
My metarig has normal limbs.super_limb (paw) bone as leg, after making rigify from it and then use GameRigTools, its subdivide bones in my leg, now instead of 3 there are 9 of them and i cannot make IK in Unreal from it.
@@CGDive so rigify make this subdivide, I looked at the meta rig again, in the bone settings Limb Segments was set to 3, after changing to 1 the final effect is as it should be. And i found that Full Body IK in unreal works even for subdivided limbs
When I add extra bones and import to SK_Mannequin, unreal engine crashes. What is the process for importing characters with additional bones to the SK_Mannequin?
@@CGDive That is the tutorial I use. I posted more information on your GRT support forum in your discord server. It seems your addon crashes UE5.1 but not 5.0.3 when adding extra bones. A log file is on your discord server.
Yeah, they are similar Both prepare rigs for game export. This addon is more versatile because it works with any rig, not just rigify. And it allows you to achieve different setups by tweaking the settings. Arigify on the other hand is probably easier to use since it's focused on just rigify.
Ok so I've discovered something that can be a serious problem. Basically, the bone hierarchy is all messed up. After generating the game rig, legs, clavicles and arms got unparented from the spine and pelvis bones. This isn't a problem... until you try to use animation montage in UE4. Trying to blend two animations from "spine up" doesn't work, because the arms are not parented to the spine. Reparenting those bones in blender (keeping offset) messes up the animations. So, yeah, basically this method seems broken for advanced animations (like walking and reloading a gun at the same time). Edit: Okay so this can be fixed by re-baking the animations, so the control rig can still correctly control the game rig, even after fixing the hierarchy in the game rig by reparenting the bones. CGDive if you'd like me to explain the problem better, let me know.
Unreal keeps change leg bone positions. It shifts them all up one and eliminates the toe. So the toe is at the foot, the foot is at the shin1, shin 1 is at shin2 and so on. My thigh bones are at the pelvis bone and the pelvis bones are points in the base of the spine. Also my character has this wobble to him. In blender his feet are planted and don’t move in an idle animation and in unreal they wobble around like they are affected by some other bone or something. I just don’t get what’s happening or how to fix it.
@@CGDive yeah, through enough experimenting I've finally discovered why the UE bones look the way they do, and it's very misleading. The actual bones are the circles, not the the shafts. The little circles represent the bones and their pivot points and they affect the area beyond where there is nothing, the shafts that I thought were the bones and highlight when I select them are just the connection point to the parented bone and don't really mean anything beyond that. So, in blender I select the shaft parts and those are the bones but in ue they are just the visual representation of one bone parented to another and the bone is the small ball on the end. Misleading but at least it makes sense now. I still have the problem as to why the animations aren't 1:1. I have an idlel animation where in blender the feet are planted solid and don't move at all but exporting to ue the feet wobble around slightly it's not too bad I guess, but I'd really like it if the feet didn't wobble around when he should be standing perfectly still.
In the ancient city of Babylon? I don't think they had PCs back then :P Seriously, I have no idea what you mean :) If that's a game engine, then yes. You can prepare your rig for export using the addon. But as far as export etc, the addon doesn't do anything in particular.
@@CGDive Haha, yeah it is a WebGL engine. I had some glitches before using mixamo's control rig paired with Faceit, will do some tests with this tool. Thank you!
Alrighty, is there a way to have the generated game rig with just one bone for each thigh, shin, upperarm and forearm rather than it splitting into two bones each?
Yes. I assume you use Rigify, so you have to go through the rig type of each arm and leg and set Bone Segments to 1. Generate your rig, then generate a game rig from it.
@@CGDive blimey now theres's a setting you'd never find by accident hidden away in the metarig rigify options :D Nice one cheers for that :) I'll leave this here in case anyone ever needs it: Pose mode -> select arm/leg bone at the start of the bone chain -> bone tab -> rigify type -> limb segments
i have follow all step in this tutorial i use rig bone in unity become scary my character always squatch ang stretch like monster why it coild be happen? i move the root circle while work on Blender i dont know how to make root motion work well
This is super helpful! Thank you. Why does the game rig need to create extra bones for arms and legs (.001)? Unity doesn't seem to require those for humanoid rigs, neither does mixamo skeletons.
Could be but it's not the main focus of the addon. I just don't have a lot of experience with 2d stuff myself... You could try it and if you find any problems, let me know.
I have spent the last few days watching your videos. I'm starting my first video game, and I was looking for this kind of content to prevent as many drawbacks as I can. Really thanks for these tutorials. I have a doubt. If my armature only had simple bones and some IK controls, should I bake over another rigg that doesn't have IK controls? Again, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge🙏
This is awesome! However, how do you delete a game rig once you've created it and don't want it anymore? Or let's say you changed the control rig, how do you update the game rig to reflect those changes?
If you want to delete the game rig, just delete it. :) You can also unparent the meshes from the Game Rig and parent them again to the Control rig. From there you can tweak the Control rig and extract a new game rig. Generally, I'd only extract the Game Rig if I am done with the control rig. But I understand that's not ideal and there should be ways to switch between the two easily. I'll note this as a possible future feature.
Which Blender version? If you are using pre-Blender 3, eyes are not generated. This is how you can add them manually.: th-cam.com/video/Z1pL-ZUL0YU/w-d-xo.html
I used it to transfer my first animal skeleton (Rigify Basic Quadruped) to Unreal, it's working fine, the Yaw is actually set as Roll in it, that seems no big deal since I'm making the animations for it anyway, and the joints representations are about 100 times bigger, so I have to diminish them every time I go edit an animation. Do you know a fix for the last one at least?
Regarding the orientation problem, I have it on my todo list to really figure it out. But as you say, it doesn't seem to be a major issue. As for the 100x issue, I recommend using the Send2Unreal addon. It solves that and other annoying problems. Check out this video th-cam.com/video/y51-tXjKEzc/w-d-xo.html
![[Addon] Blender to UE4 : Rig Any character wth the Mannequin skeleton](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/uH52niTccLU/mqdefault.jpg)
![[Addon] Blender to UE4 : Rig Any character wth the Mannequin skeleton](/img/tr.png)
![[Blender] Game-ready Rigs #1 - (Unreal/Unity/Godot)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hdGkKbtQxE0/mqdefault.jpg)
![[Blender addon] Rig any character with the UE5 Manny/Quinn skeleton](/img/n.gif)
I literally could not have done this without your videos. Thank you so much and keep up the great work.
Glad I could help and thanks for the contribution! :)
@@CGDive Hey im sorry, but can you help me out maybe ? When i use the tool and import the armature to unity the head bone gets always deletet.
@@Mo-go7ph hmmmm, I don't use Unity regularly so hard to say. Are you sure it is deleted? Sometimes the representation of bones is just different between 3D software but the effect is the same.
After watching your rigify series I started doing a similar process on my own, glad to see it automated!
YES! I've been waiting for this addon and it looks amazing, even supports squash and stretch!
Will 100% pay for your amazing work, thank you!
I've been completely bumped after I spent weeks on animations only to put them on Unreal and they completly broke. Tried every export settings I could find, to no avail, and I almost gave up on my game entirely. You are the only that talked about baking the animations to a game ready rig, I swear. You saved my game, thank you.
That's so awesome! Glad you found the addon useful!
Been watching your Blender rigging tutorials for a couple of weeks now to get comfortable switching from Maya and I have the utmost respect for you. The educational content and resources you provide are gold, Thank you so much! (And you even provide this add on for free for those who cannot afford the purchase *mindblown* you are amazing man)
Thanks! Good to hear that my stuff is useful when switching from Maya.
And also we have the acknowledge the guy who made the addon @blenderboi
I don't want it... I NEED IT!!! WOW! This is a marvelous tool!! 🙀 - Question: If I set up extra bones in Rigify (or rig bone types additionally than the ones by default, and their layer orders and visibility) will the addon still work?
Great video!!
It Should work, as long as the bone you want to extract is a deform bone, it will just grab it
Simplified explanation on what the Addon Basicly Do:
- Make A copy of the Control Bone
- Remove All other Bone other than deform bone (unless you change some settings)
- Remove Drivers, Constraints, Custom Properties (and some other clean up that I might missed)
- Constraint the Deform bone to the Control Bone
So Generally It should just work
Yep, Rigify rigs, even customized ones, should work great with the addon. As Blenderboi said it just extracts the deform bones and constrains them to the Control rig. You can do more complex stuff like extracting the select bones. A lot of customization is possible.
@@tinkerboi I appreciate the answer. I just bought it and I can't wait to stress-test it with extra hair rigged-deforming bones.
@@CGDive Fantastic! I feel everyone downloading this addon will unlock PREMIUM content using Blender (if Blender was a videogame)- Great work, you guys!
@@tinkerboi please help me
i used that add on
my character become monster in unity
always stretch and squash
so scary
THIS LITERALLY SAVED MY LIFE I WAS ABOUT TO END IT AND THIS VIDEO POPPED UP THANK YOU SO MUCH
Glad to hear that you're still among us! Take it easy! :)
A problem solved for me before I ever had to suffer it. Thank you so much, to you and Blenderboi. Great work!
It even looks like it'll work with strange armatures made with Rigify, like those Frankenstein rigs you mentioned in your other videos. Makes me excited to get into animating my indie game again.
Yep, it should work for most rigs. If it doesn't feel free to get in touch. We have a discord by the way discord.gg/YFH5HUv
@@CGDive Fantastic! And I actually already joined that like 2 minutes ago. 😆
Well between this, Rigify/AutoRigPro and Animaide I am fully cover to do my projects. Thank you so much to both creating such an add-on
That's just beautiful, my hero doesn't use cape, instead, he carry a strong accent and make life saving videos
CGDive: Saving lives, one butchered word at a time, since 2020!
Glad it was helpful :)
You taught me how to rig and make my rigs come to life. Yes I've had issues that I've learned how to deal with the NLA editor and baking issues. I definitely need to support you because even though things like Auto-Rig solves these issues, you do everything with an optional price tag which is awesome for people without the budget. I hope good things come your way man. I was wondering, does this generate a control rig if you only have the deform rig and does it have FK/IK switching or do I have to make all that?
Hey thanks, man!
The addon doesn't generate a control rig. It can only do the opposite: generate a deform rig from an existing control rig. If you want to generate a control rig, I recommended Rigify :)
when i export to ue4 I can't use root motion. is because name or something? anyone can help?
root motion has to be set up in a specific way. I'll make a video on that in the future.
You need to leave the root bone of the CONTROL RIG as "Deform" and when you generate the GAME RIG, you have to parent the other bones to the root
Does any get this error when exporting with send to unreal
Haven't seen it. Best approach is to submit this in the issues section on GitHub. The developer will respond. It could be a bug and they may fix it thanks to your report,
thank you for this!! made me realize, to get my rigify rig exporting properly, i needed to check in GLTF export settings > Data > Armature > Export Deformation Bones Only as well as Flatten Bone Hierarchy and now it works! The animations were deforming oddly after export to godot as glb/reimport to blender and now it works after this!
Hello
First, your addon is incredible. I can finally use meta rig controls easily for creating game assets! I have finally a good workflow
However, I simply would ask you something: how about the root bone? I can animate the root control, but cannot export it for using root motion (on Unity)
All the root control keyframess are baked on DEF bones, there is no root bones on the game rig
A root bone is not extracted by default but you can extract it. Watch the tutorial videos carefully to understand how extraction works.
@@CGDive Thank you, I will watch them more carefully. Tbh I didn't remember if that was something you already explained
Absolutely stellar tool!!!! Good job. Tool works great and with this excellent tutorial series it's really easy to use. Very powerful!
Nice, so glad to hear this 👍
is parenting bones necessary? if yes, why would i need to do that though? because logically the animation are made using the control rig so the baked animation in the game rig won't break or go nuts
i learned everything regarding rigging in blender from this channel only.now another problem solved thanks to #cgdive
I've spent 2 evenings watching most of your videos on animation and preparing a game-ready rig - that was very interesting. Thanks! And it's so great, that I understand what this add-on does under the hood. Amazing work!
you're the jesus christ of rigging
LOLz :D
omg.... omg... duuudeeeeeeeeeeeeee i was doing your rigifying with unreal but now this... you are amazing... like simply amazing.
The addon works great with Rigify and unreal. Have fun 😁
Addon has been working great and I love it.
No idea how to submit a bug report, since there isn't a repository or a developer email that I could see on addon pages or readme.
At least in the beta version for 4.0, I get an error line 1117 of the GRT_Action_Bakery python script which causes action baking to fail. This happens when not all elements are visible in my view layer in the scene currently, which is surprising to me. I suspect it's specifically the visibility of the control and game rig, but don't want to overspecify as I haven't thoroughly tested.
So, I'll be enabling visibility for everything in my scene temporarily whenever I bake actions. I doubt that is a strict function of blenders internals, unless blender truly obscures logical elements that are visually hidden, so hopefully that can be fixed in a future version.
If anyone knows the appropriate address to forward bug reports to, please let me know so I can do better than a youtube comment, figured it might be good to put in here in case someone else encounters the same issue.
What is action baking and how do i find out more about it? im currently making a 3D platformer and was looking into updating my rig to an IK rig.
Buying this now it’s a must have!
Your videos are unparalleled! To the point, precise, and honest when Blender does 'Blender' things for which there is no explanation. I'm exploring Game Rig Tools as an additional tool in my arsenal to get content into Unreal. Money is tight right now, but you've more than earned it from me. I'll get it to you. Thank you for all you do!
p.s. ~ I've become more comfortable posing, working with model rigs, and with enough time could put together a solid animation. For one character. But that single character, the hands still go through the rest of the body mesh (there's no 'volume' to the mesh, no 'skin' as a boundary limitation despite the obvious appearance of, well, skin..?). Overall, single character isn't too difficult with some practice. Two or more characters in the same fight scene --> hands go through faces, kicks bury shin-deep in stomachs, on and on. I can precisely animate to the smallest fraction each action and reaction but there's no way professionals are working like that. I'm clearly missing something. Collisions, yes, but I'm wondering if there's a combination of techniques that allow for more of a 'flow', where after some setup and fine-tuning it's more 'natural' for character A, B, C.. to effect the other character? Obviously, still needs animation, but for example, A throws a punch at B, connects in the jaw, and character B's rig (at least) moves with the punch WHILE the two meshes are connected (if post-contact automated 'drag' is possible that would be, perfect lol). Just my own struggles but maybe a video idea or two in there. Thank you!
Hey, thanks for the good words!
As for your question... in fact, professionals are animating like this. There is no volume to the digital character, you have to make it appear as if there is.
I am sure the future will bring new features that will make digital characters more "physical". But for now, there isn't or if there is, it would be very difficult to set up.
Am I correct in thinking that I must create my own Metarig using Rigify chains. And that that skeleton must not have hip bones if it is going to Unreal. Then generate the Control rig in Rigify -> Generate Rig, and weight paint. Then in GRT Generate Game Rig to get an exportable skeleton that can be retargeted in UE?
Simply using the Rigify rig with hip bones, instead of building one without hip bones, will issue in a Game rig that has hip bones, in other words. And hip bones cannot be easily retargeted in UE.
I honestly have no idea what you mean :)
If you add a standard Blender Rigify rig, convert it into a control rig and weight a mesh to it, then you convert that control rig to a game ready rig using Game Rig Tools, you end with a game ready rig that has hip bones, with weights on those hip bones. You do not get the rig illustrated in the above video. And I do not see how a bone in the UE rig is supposed to map onto two hip bones during retargeting in UE. Therefore it seems that the rig you have used in the video is a hand crafted Rigify rig without hip bones.
@@stephenjones8114 Ah, yeah. I probably removed the hip bones since they don't have any functionality and just create slightly better automatic weights. There is not much hand-crafting involved. I just deleted them from the metarig and generated the rig.
@@CGDive Long way round, but am building rig from Rigify bits and pieces as you illustrated. Excellent tutorials.
Actually maybe I could bend your ear. The problem seems to be workflow. Getting animations out of UE, into Blender, onto a rig, finessing animations for that rig in Blender, and exporting them back into UE.
Human Generator produces excellent mesh. Clothes can be hacked out of that mesh.
Autorig pro produces fast rig, and weights it well. But retargeting is fraught. Don't know whether to retarget twist or IK. The autorig naming convention is confusing.
Rigify produces good rigs. But retargeting via Rokoko is little better than Autorig.
Neither seem to support finessing animations. Fixing arms so they don't cut through the body for example. In fact there is little on the net that walks through how to dig into an existing animation, strip the graph editor into the relevant parts required to make adjustments, and how to incorporate that fix into the existing animation.
Which kind of leads me back to Game Rig Tools. A Rigify rig can be exported to UE with animations using this tool. That part is covered. Slapping a Human Generator mesh onto a Rigify rig is not a problem. I believe Autorig Pro can retarget from UE rig to Rigify rig. A Rigify rig has the controls to adjust animations once retargeted. The outstanding issue is the graph editor.
Like I say, I have watched your tutorials and they are excellent. But I still have this issue.
Thank you so much for the video and the addon. Looks amazing and I will definitely try it. Also big thumbs up for the pay-as-much-as-you-can approach. You guys are awesome!
could you maybe import the ue4 mannequin and generate a control rig from that the video is confusing as the character already has a control rig
what about face rig
If you have a face rig in your control armature, you can make it game-ready. In the addon files there are videos and I show one workflow for the Rigify face rig.
This is surely a massive step in the right direction
Coming from Maya, Blender has my respect. This addon is awesome!
Thanks, that means a lot!
Thank You
ima gonna try this out. After watching Unreal's official unreal to rigify videos it's a horrible obtuse mess, this seems more promising! (:
UE 2 Rigify is a bit hard to get into but it can be powerful.
As for our stuff, also check out the "Unreal Module" which allows you to rig characters with Mannquin/Manny skeleton
th-cam.com/video/U23WyAd8o_8/w-d-xo.html
Although I'm only starting my journey as a game developer outside of a GCS, I know now that the sky is the limit, and the content you provide - videos and addon recommendations - are invaluable resources in the way of animation in game development. As things are for myself financially, I can't give back to the people who give so much expecting nothing in return, but I will when I can. Pinky Promise!
Wow. Pinky Promise is serious stuff. You better not break it! haha
Good luck!
How can I get back to the control rig, I see, that whenever i bake, all my items that used to be armatured to the CTRL rig now are armatured to deform after baking anims to nla. I don't wanna change manually each asset back to the correct rig
At 21:36 it is explained why the game rig and control rig become disconnected. To connect them again simply select the Game Rig (NOT the control rig!) and press the Unmute button above "Generate Game Rig".
Thank you men , this plug-in is amazing and time saving . you guys are the best
Hi how do I create the control rig ? The thingy with all the arrows and wireframes structure around the mesh. Thanks !
You can use Rigify, Auto-Rig Pro, or create it yourself
Rigify videos
th-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJv68SSdwxip33M7snakl6Dx.html
Auto-Rig Pro Videos
th-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJuHJFQgb4altQWs-RCKA7Bq.html
I don't have much on manual rigging but there is plenty on the internets :)
And how do i properly export that game ready rig? Did you cover this in the video?
Exporting can be specific to the game engine. I have videos for UE4, Unity and Godot. Check the playlists. Generally you export FBX and import it in your engine.
I was just about to rig my most complex model yet and then try bringing my work from Blender to Unreal for the first time and I'm so glad I found this in time. I didn't know a Rigify rig by itself wasn't going to translate well into game engines, so this is gonna be a life saver for me. Thank you so much!!!
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 This is amazing!!
I just came across this video and i am definitely gonna purchase it. I do have a question. After rigging a character, will the body be compatible with adding a metahuman head to it? Ive seen videos now on how you can add their heads on a properly rigged body. So will this software do the trick? Thanks!
Hi. No, there is no built-in workflow for Metahumans (neither heads, nor bodies).
Jesus Christ man your a genius, thanks so much for this...seriously.
Hope it's useful, man! Let me know if you need help with the addon.
Your UE stuff looks cool. I'll check it out when I have a minute.
@@CGDive Oh thanks, and yeah, this plugin just saved me a lot of headaches. Thanks again! A guy setup a control rig and the hands were decoupled....that really gave me a headache trying to figure out how to fix it without messing that up. I was about ready to give up on it when I seen this video.
it does not creating root bone, but unreal as i see make his own
I really don’t know blender the way I wish I did. Would this work with sims 4 wicked whims mod?
I can't say for sure, sorry. If they can import a generalized rig, then yes. If they need a highly specific one, then probably yes but with special tweaks that you have to do yourself.
parenting doestn't work (( I stuck here and can't move forward
Parenting doesn't work?
So this addon, from how I understand, will still require you to rig your models with Rigify, is that right?
Yes, with Rigify or another type of rig.
ca we add custom bones that are attached to the mannequin but not skinned to anything? I tried this and when exporting to UE5 the skeleton wasn't recognized.
I am not sure what this question is related to. Did I show a similar workflow?
So do I need to rig first with rigify for example to get the control rig then use this tool to make a mannequin compatible skeleton
The addon is not a dedicated UE tool and it does not make a mannequin compatible skeleton. It makes a general game-ready rig which can be used in UE or any engine but compatibility with a specific standard is not guaranteed.
I'm having issues with baking the animations. It wont bake more than one at a time and to me it seems its somewhat random what animation it does bake. It does make NLA tracks with keyframes at the start n the end but no other keyframes in-between at all. I cant seem to figure out why. I've tried messing with the settings of the GRT action bakery but no luck. Anyone had a similar issue or has a potential solution?
I think you posted this on discord as well right? Let's keep talking there.
From what I gather, you are not using the recommended workflow so it may not be considered an issue/bug.
Lifesaver
You are a life saver bro.
Thought I'd try giving blender a shot. I can't even get the add-on to show after installing it. Tried it on 3 different versions of blender.
In the downloads, there should be multiple files. Pay attention to their names: the blender version they are meant to work with is included in the name. So for Blender 3.3 get Game-Rig-Tools-3.3x. The GRT 3.3 version should work with Blender 3.4 as well. Let me know if it doesn't.
What if animations are already working on unity with a dummy I had and I just want to replace the character with the game rig would that be possible without loosing the animations?
Not sure, I guess it depends. If the two skeletons are compatible it might be possible.
I can't find the action bakery, please me
I can't say for sure based just on what you said. All I can say is ... it should be there :)
Make sure you are using the appropriate GRT version for your Blender version.
If you can share a screenshot or video what you see, that could be helpful!
this is cool but not mixamo and c4d has AI rigging tools
No idea what c4d has but mixamo is not AI 😂
It's a pretty old but still good tech.
I'm always grateful.
OH!! My light!!
This is awesome! Nice work!
sweet, I assume this works with 3.0?
Yes, just get the newest version of the addon.
@@CGDive downloading now
Will this work for a vehicle steering IK?
I'm not sure what steering ik is? :)
Hello, is it possible to utilise this for root motion as well? My character moves forward with the root bone translating, can this be transferred into the game rig?
The addon doesn't have any dedicated tools for that but if you add a root bone in your game armature and constrain it to the root of your control rig, it will be exported and you can use it in your game engine. When you extract the game rig there are options and you can specify what is being exported. If you choose "Deform and Selected" and just select the root bone, that should extract the bones you want.
what earlier video? you mention an earlier video that goes over squash and stretch issues but you dont mention which video and i cant find a link
Good point, added it to the video description.
Here it is:
th-cam.com/video/8PSj_1-E9uY/w-d-xo.html
this is the best, thank you!
would this work with a rigacar rig ? or there is an addon for making rigs for game car rigs but would be great to just to have one addon for both?
GRT should work with Rigacar if it doesn't already organize its bones in a way that is easy to export.
i think this could also help for retargeting mocap to a complex rig? super cool addon
Hello, Why "constraint to armature name" doesn't clear the constraints? It'll add the desired one, but it will not clear the constraints before the new one. Maybe I am doing something wrong?
Ah, good call. It probably doesn't do it. I'll ask Blenderboi (the dev) if he can add the feature.
@@CGDive Thank you, have a wonderful day. 🌹
can anyone please help me, i'm converting the rigiffy rig to game rig using this addon but the newly created rig-deform bones are not parented properly (as mentioned in the video) but the face bones are all serparate and i don't know where should i parent them, any help?
For the face bones, I recommend to just select all of them and parent them to the head. Keep in mind that the Rigify face is quite complex and not necessarily meant for games.
@@CGDive thanks for the quick reply, what other method would you suggest for facial then?
Does the rig use the same naming conventions and heirarchy in all instances?
Which rig?
Hi, sorry if this is a silly question, I'm a bit new to this whole process. I'm currently creating characters using Character Creator 4 and I import them into Blender using their CC Pipeline addon. This addon also includes a button called "Rigify" which creates a really nice and detailed rig. My understanding is that your addon can convert this rig into a game ready one so that it can be imported into game engines like Unreal 5. I didn't see any examples however for game ready face rigs, are those not supported or how does that work? Thank you!
When you get the addon you will find a couple of videos in the files. One of them shows a possible workflow for faces. check it out!
@@CGDive thank you for your reply! I purchased the addon and have been playing around with it the past couple of days. The videos provided are pretty easy to understand, however I'm still not able to import the rigged character into a standard UE5 Third Person project and replace the default mannequin with my character mesh and have it use the same walking/running animations that the mannequin comes with. Do you happen to have any recommendations on what video to watch for this last step? Thank you!
@@Pulciu you probably want the Unreal module of GRT for that. Check out this playlist, all the info you need is there
th-cam.com/play/PLdcL5aF8ZcJv6Hd5wGEiHxpYpzAMJPnsB.html
It's almost perfect, for that you only need to have the option: create root bone for unreal engine.
It can be done but yeah, there is no automated solution for that. It's kind of on my radar. :)
This is amazing!
My metarig has normal limbs.super_limb (paw) bone as leg, after making rigify from it and then use GameRigTools, its subdivide bones in my leg, now instead of 3 there are 9 of them and i cannot make IK in Unreal from it.
These are twist bones. You have to understand how Rigify works. GRT just extracts your Deform bones.
@@CGDive so rigify make this subdivide, I looked at the meta rig again, in the bone settings Limb Segments was set to 3, after changing to 1 the final effect is as it should be. And i found that Full Body IK in unreal works even for subdivided limbs
When I add extra bones and import to SK_Mannequin, unreal engine crashes. What is the process for importing characters with additional bones to the SK_Mannequin?
We made a tool specifically for UE. Did you check it out?
th-cam.com/video/uH52niTccLU/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/U23WyAd8o_8/w-d-xo.html
@@CGDive That is the tutorial I use. I posted more information on your GRT support forum in your discord server. It seems your addon crashes UE5.1 but not 5.0.3 when adding extra bones. A log file is on your discord server.
Is Game Rig Tools similar to Arigify?
Yeah, they are similar Both prepare rigs for game export. This addon is more versatile because it works with any rig, not just rigify. And it allows you to achieve different setups by tweaking the settings. Arigify on the other hand is probably easier to use since it's focused on just rigify.
great job!
👍
respect!!!!
Your content is exactly what I was looking for past 2 weeks, I'll definitely subscribe and continue on learning!
Ok so I've discovered something that can be a serious problem.
Basically, the bone hierarchy is all messed up. After generating the game rig, legs, clavicles and arms got unparented from the spine and pelvis bones. This isn't a problem... until you try to use animation montage in UE4. Trying to blend two animations from "spine up" doesn't work, because the arms are not parented to the spine. Reparenting those bones in blender (keeping offset) messes up the animations.
So, yeah, basically this method seems broken for advanced animations (like walking and reloading a gun at the same time).
Edit: Okay so this can be fixed by re-baking the animations, so the control rig can still correctly control the game rig, even after fixing the hierarchy in the game rig by reparenting the bones.
CGDive if you'd like me to explain the problem better, let me know.
Yes, please explain.
As I said in the video, the addon does not fix the hierarchy for you but you can do it manually.
12:50
Unreal keeps change leg bone positions. It shifts them all up one and eliminates the toe. So the toe is at the foot, the foot is at the shin1, shin 1 is at shin2 and so on. My thigh bones are at the pelvis bone and the pelvis bones are points in the base of the spine. Also my character has this wobble to him. In blender his feet are planted and don’t move in an idle animation and in unreal they wobble around like they are affected by some other bone or something. I just don’t get what’s happening or how to fix it.
UE just displays bones differently.
@@CGDive yeah, through enough experimenting I've finally discovered why the UE bones look the way they do, and it's very misleading. The actual bones are the circles, not the the shafts. The little circles represent the bones and their pivot points and they affect the area beyond where there is nothing, the shafts that I thought were the bones and highlight when I select them are just the connection point to the parented bone and don't really mean anything beyond that. So, in blender I select the shaft parts and those are the bones but in ue they are just the visual representation of one bone parented to another and the bone is the small ball on the end. Misleading but at least it makes sense now. I still have the problem as to why the animations aren't 1:1. I have an idlel animation where in blender the feet are planted solid and don't move at all but exporting to ue the feet wobble around slightly it's not too bad I guess, but I'd really like it if the feet didn't wobble around when he should be standing perfectly still.
Awsome!!
This is genuine magic thank you so much!
Glad you like it!
I require a script for a pes 2013 game to import and export cameras and animations. I'm going to pay you for it, how do I contact you?
This sounds very specific and a bit beyond our scope.
Hi! Would it work in Babylon with gltf format?
In the ancient city of Babylon? I don't think they had PCs back then :P
Seriously, I have no idea what you mean :)
If that's a game engine, then yes. You can prepare your rig for export using the addon. But as far as export etc, the addon doesn't do anything in particular.
@@CGDive Haha, yeah it is a WebGL engine. I had some glitches before using mixamo's control rig paired with Faceit, will do some tests with this tool. Thank you!
Alrighty, is there a way to have the generated game rig with just one bone for each thigh, shin, upperarm and forearm rather than it splitting into two bones each?
Yes. I assume you use Rigify, so you have to go through the rig type of each arm and leg and set Bone Segments to 1. Generate your rig, then generate a game rig from it.
@@CGDive blimey now theres's a setting you'd never find by accident hidden away in the metarig rigify options :D
Nice one cheers for that :)
I'll leave this here in case anyone ever needs it:
Pose mode -> select arm/leg bone at the start of the bone chain -> bone tab -> rigify type -> limb segments
i have follow all step in this tutorial
i use rig bone
in unity become scary
my character always squatch ang stretch like monster
why it coild be happen?
i move the root circle while work on Blender
i dont know how to make root motion work well
It sounds like you have some stretching in the rig. The addon should fix that. You can send me a file if you'd like me to take a look.
@@CGDive i Will send tommorow
Thank you
@@Rinka17 Cool.
HI; DOES IT INSTALLS ON BLENDER 3.5? I NEED IT PLEASE!
It is tested and work in Blender 3.5 if you install the correct addon version.
Just for humanoid Rigs?
Nope, for any rig! ;)
In fact, we don't fully support humanoid/Mannequin yet.
This is super helpful! Thank you. Why does the game rig need to create extra bones for arms and legs (.001)? Unity doesn't seem to require those for humanoid rigs, neither does mixamo skeletons.
GRT does not create anything. These are standard "twist" bones in Rigify, You can remove them by tweaking the Rig Type settings of the metarig.
@@CGDive Thank you! Appreciate the help!
@@mikeohc Hello friend, could you tell me how you solved it? I have the same problem and I'm not very good with Blender. :(
@@p.rick9723 I used the Mixamo plugin, with a mixamo skeleton. Then GameRigs to export the armature. It's a lot more simplified
is this tool good for making avatars for vrchat
The addon just makes sure that your export rig is nice and clean. This is good for exporting to any application :)
I will stick with auto rig pro
Auto rig pro is a great choice.
Can i use this rig for gta?
Possibly although I am not familiar with the GTA modding tools.
Its great , i think fps hands rig is missing, kindly include it, i work on fps games only
is this applicable to 2d characters?
Could be but it's not the main focus of the addon. I just don't have a lot of experience with 2d stuff myself...
You could try it and if you find any problems, let me know.
I would recommend our team members to support this project and Thank you. How to bake all the NLA strips into one? Do you know that? Thank you.
Thank you!
I have spent the last few days watching your videos. I'm starting my first video game, and I was looking for this kind of content to prevent as many drawbacks as I can. Really thanks for these tutorials.
I have a doubt. If my armature only had simple bones and some IK controls, should I bake over another rigg that doesn't have IK controls?
Again, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge🙏
If you want to simplify your armature as much as possible, then yes, you should have an export rig without IK and other complex stuff.
OMG this plugin is a lifesaver! Just bought it!
This is awesome! However, how do you delete a game rig once you've created it and don't want it anymore? Or let's say you changed the control rig, how do you update the game rig to reflect those changes?
If you want to delete the game rig, just delete it. :) You can also unparent the meshes from the Game Rig and parent them again to the Control rig. From there you can tweak the Control rig and extract a new game rig.
Generally, I'd only extract the Game Rig if I am done with the control rig. But I understand that's not ideal and there should be ways to switch between the two easily. I'll note this as a possible future feature.
Hi, I made a character that has a face, but I can't find the bones that control the eyes, please help!
Which Blender version? If you are using pre-Blender 3, eyes are not generated. This is how you can add them manually.:
th-cam.com/video/Z1pL-ZUL0YU/w-d-xo.html
@@CGDive Thank you soooo much!!❤
Is the addon compatible with blender 3.0.0/3.1.0?
We'll start testing it ASAP. Try it and if you get any errors, let us know.
@@CGDive Yessir
@@Zarosian_Ice thanks, appreciate it! 👍
I used it to transfer my first animal skeleton (Rigify Basic Quadruped) to Unreal, it's working fine, the Yaw is actually set as Roll in it, that seems no big deal since I'm making the animations for it anyway, and the joints representations are about 100 times bigger, so I have to diminish them every time I go edit an animation. Do you know a fix for the last one at least?
Regarding the orientation problem, I have it on my todo list to really figure it out. But as you say, it doesn't seem to be a major issue.
As for the 100x issue, I recommend using the Send2Unreal addon. It solves that and other annoying problems.
Check out this video
th-cam.com/video/y51-tXjKEzc/w-d-xo.html