Note: there’s a lot of Mastodon embeds in this post.
Late last year, I made a post (or toot I guess?) on Mastodon showing a test of a custom rig I was working on.
And about a day later created what would be the first render I made utilizing this rig for the first time
Now normally this would be the part where I would say that I’ve made now the rig public for anyone to download, but there’s actually a little but of history behind this rig that goes beyond 2023. If you’re only here for the download, then it’s on my resources page, but now let’s delve into the history, as well as some of the design decisions.
The creation of this rig goes back not to 2023 but 2020, back during my time on the Black Plasma Studios (BPS) Discord server. For a bit of context, I had only been using Blender for about 2 or 3 months at this point, so naturally when I decided to try and make my own rig, it didn’t go well.
Fast forward 3 years and I’m annoyed at having to deal with the issues from the aging BPS V3 rig. I did go back to that rig for a little bit but eventually decided to try and debug BPS V3. BPS V3 is, for the lack of a better term, a clusterfuck to debug.
Although I was eventually able to fix the issues I had, it was clear from then on that fixing issues in BPS V3 as it aged further was not worth my time. There is a BPS V4 rig, but stylistically is not easily modifiable, at least when I tried a long time back. So I decided to finally finish the rig I started 3-4 years.
When it comes to rigs, I have the following requirements:
- Easily modifiable
- Aren’t taxing on my system (you’d be surprised how many Minecraft rigs are extremely taxing)
- Don’t use too many drivers (to reduce potential issues)
- Don’t depend on Python scripts or addons
By the way, I want to expand on that last point: so many Minecraft rigs these days
depend on addons and scripts. Yes, I know technically they’re just UIs for custom
properties, but seriously, are they necessary? I’ve already seen riggers use horrible
Python practices in their addons like using eval just to set a variable on an object
(use setattr for that if you’re working with strings), importing “DLCs” (seriously?),
etc. And 75% of the time, these addons stop getting maintained after a few Blender
versions, or if they still do get maintained, only for the latest release
(though I can’t blame them with the changes Blender gets in the API every release).
It’s honestly made me consider adding a system in MCprep to allow riggers to
create UIs for their rigs without needing to make their own addons, but I digress.
It’s why with this rig, I decided to make it as minimal as possible. No, I won’t make an addon with a UI for it (it’s not needed). No I won’t add extrusion support (I don’t need it, and there’s many options for that). And no, I won’t a smooth mouth (it doesn’t fit my style and again, there’s many options for that). This rig is as minimal as possible, and improvements will mostly come in the form of the actual rigging itself (i.e. the bones and controls).
Oh, and before I forget, let me thank the following people for helping with the rig early on.
- Junaaydshaikh121
- Pheonix209
- Vortex
Sadly now I only have Vortex’s contact, and not the other 2 (and I haven’t contacted them in the last 4 years). Wherever they are, I hope they’re doing well.
That’s pretty much all I have. As mentioned earlier, the rig is now on my resources page, for download. Cya!