Question, Rigging in blender 2.9, any tips before I start?

littleclaude

Hi

I have a question about rigging in blender 2.9, any tips before I start? I am new to blender and I am switching over from 3DSmax/Maya so I am slowing going over everything and chipping away at the many functions. 

I need to rig a human character and a dinosaur, would you have any hints or tips at where is a good place to learn, tools, plugins, tutorials, books l should research into. 

Thank you. 

FourtyNights

@littleclaude

For additional plugins (paid) helping with weight painting these are the ones I've bought:

Bartosz Styperek's "Weight Paint Tools" addon:
https://gumroad.com/l/weight_paint_tools
Documentation with videos:
https://joseconseco.github.io/WeightPaintToolsDocs/

+ it includes a bonus addon (draw_weights.py) to display weights in the "Softimage" style. It's an overlay on top of the Blender's internal weights, so it's better to use Blender's custom weights with black color for both zero and max weights if using that addon, for maximum clarity.

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"Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning" addon:
https://blendermarket.com/products/voxel-heat-diffuse-skinning
Docs and tutorials can be found from the product's page itself. It also includes "Surface Heat Diffuse Skinning" solution as well, which is essentially the same as Blender's internal "automatic weights", but it's robust and doesn't fail.

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"Corrective Smooth Baker" addon:
https://blendermarket.com/products/corrective-smooth-baker
Docs and tutorials can be found from the product's page itself here as well.

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Danny Mac's great quick tutorial how to use corrective shape keys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WmFaBlDBHs

Hope this helps to you get started. If anyone else has some more tips, tricks and tutorials for rigging/weight painting, I'm also interested to learn more.

littleclaude

Perfect, thanks for this I will look into them all.