Blender Expy Kit addon: Mixamo to Rigify

welcome to cg dive in this video we'll talk about an awesome add-on called xpikit it has a number of features that connect blenders regify the miximo animation library and game engines in this video i'll focus on miximo and rigify and in future videos we may explore other workflows feel free to let me know what you would like to see in the comments as you may know there is a miximo item for blender which creates control rigs for miximo animations but if you want to use rigify then xp kit is the way to go xp kid was developed by paulo and he introduced it on his youtube channel balls ninjas which is the best youtube channel name ever no contest please subscribe and share his stuff because he deserves more recognition for the great work he's doing to download and install xp kit go to this github page and if you want to test some of the experimental features you can go to the branches but in this video i'll be using one of the official releases so click on the tags link and here is version 0.2 alpha and from here i'm going to download xp kit 0.20 alpha.zip locating blender to install the add-on go to edit preferences add-ons click on install find the zip file select it and click install add-on and activate it when you have any armature object and go to pause mode and when you right click you're going to get most of the expected features in the right-click menu okay let's dive in and i'm going to show you two different workflows with exp kit in the first one we'll take an unrigged character rig it with miximo and then we'll use xpiket's features to convert this miximo armature to a rigidify one and then we can also easily apply maximo animations to it and in the other workflow we'll start with a character that is already rigged with rigidify and then we'll see how we can connect that to miximo so let's start implementing the first workflow we want to take this character to miximo if you need to limit what is being exported you can select all of your meshes that you want to export and then go to file export fpx and you could limit the export to the selected objects only and everything else i can leave to the default settings i'll export then go to miximo upload a new character and i'm going to drag and drop the fpx that i just exported out of blender make sure the character is facing front click next and then place the markers as the names indicate so chin wrists and so on click next make sure the test animation looks okay click next and confirm that you want to change the character and here i have an animation already applied to this model i'm going to press the x button so that the character is in t tepos and then press download and instead of t post i want to download it with the original pose the original rest pose that i set in blender because i don't want mixing mode to change things for me okay back in blender i'm going to move this guy aside a little bit and then import on fpx and i'm going to import the fpx that i just downloaded from miximo don't worry about the missing textures we can fix that very easily just select one of the meshes and go to the material tab and change the material from the zero zero one material to the original one without zero zero one and do that for all meshes and now i can delete the original mesh that leaves me with the exact mesh that i had at the beginning but now if i select the armature and go to pause mode it is rigged with miximo okay and here is where xp kit will come into play you should have xpiket enabled and now if you go to pause mode and right click here under exp kit you'll find the expected features and tools so now what we want is to convert this armature from miximo to rigify and so what we can do is go to conversion and extract meta rig but before we do i forgot to do something very important i have to have the transforms of the rig and character applied if i go to item you'll see that there is some unapplied rotation and scale for the armature and also for the meshes so just select everything and press ctrl a and apply all transforms and that worked for me however i have to say that if your character jumps to another position when you apply the transforms check if the armature has any keyframes if there are keyframes here just select them and delete them with the delete key and um you should also go to pause mode select all select all bones and delete any keyframes and then go to pause clear transform all that will reset your armature and then applying the transforms should work cool uh next i'll select the amateur go to pose mode and now i want to convert this miximo skeleton to rigify so right click conversion extract meta rig and the source type we have to set as miximo and you'll see that the armature change a little bit and if you're familiar with riggify you'll recognize some of these bones and here are a few settings that we have to change first let's look from the side view and you'll see that the legs are quite straight so you can use this knee offset in the other direction like this minus 0.01 for me and that will create a little bit of a bend in the knees and that will help rigify generate the legs correctly okay from the top view this way actually be fine but i'm going to give the elbow a little bit of a bend as well 0.01 is fine and then from the front view take a look at the fingers and here i think i have to set the fingers z value to minus 0.1 or so and you'll see that they lift it a little bit maybe minus 0.3 okay and that again will make sure that the fingers are generated correctly and they bend correctly the other settings should be fine one that you may be interested in is no phase pose it is on by default and if you uncheck it this will give you a face rig rigidify face rig and what you could do from here is align these bones to the face and that will also generate a face rig however the face won't be weighted to these new face bones and last week i released another video in which i showed how you can add new face bones to an existing armature so you can watch that and also in the second workflow i'll show in this video i'll show you how you can have a character with a face that you can also connect to miximo using xpikit okay so for this example i'll enable the no face bones setting and then i'm ready to generate um something else that you could do is delete some bones that you don't need i can enable in front to see the bones and so i'll go to edit mode here for the armature and breast bones and the hips bones or pelvis bones i don't need so i can delete them x and delete they weren't part of the miximo skeleton so they won't do anything so i can delete them easily by the way do not delete these heel bones they are important and then i can go back to pause mode and under armature generate the rig and what is really cool is the way xp kit works your character will now be skinned to the rigify rig so if i try to manipulate the rigid5 rig it is already working okay so i can hide the metarig cool right okay so i'll select everything and go to pause clear transform okay transform all okay so i have the character uh with a rigidify rig which is kind of based on the miximo rig so now i can go back to miximo and apply animations to my character so let's grab the silly dancing cool now i can download the character and i'm going to download it without skin to make my download lighter but here is something important downloading without skin will change the rest pose of the character a little bit xp kit is smart and it tries to account for this difference in rest poses but if the retargeting doesn't seem right then you can also try to download whisking and see if that gives you better results now i'm going to download and now back in blender i can import this new fbx so i'll go to object mode here and file import fbx and i want to import the city dancing here it is and here is how xpikit allows us to transfer this miximo animation that we just downloaded to the rigifi rig that we created so before i go i want to name this animation properly so i'll go to dope sheet action editor and here we have the animation name it's long and it doesn't tell us what it does so let's call it silly dance okay and then we can move on so to transfer an animation from the miximo rig to the riggify rig here is what you do first select the rigidify rig then shift select the miximo rig okay the order is important and then go to pause mode okay then right click go to expect binding and bind to active armature and we want to bind miximo controls and the bind target will be miximo as soon as we set this up the character will assume this pose of the animation skeleton i'm not actually an expert when it comes to these settings much object transform generally you can leave to default and i found out that if i enable chain look at that gives me results that are closer to the source rig okay notice how if i enable it the pose of the character is closer is much closer to the miximo rig and that's it we have some settings for root animation which can be very powerful and i'm going to try to cover them in another video okay so now if i play this animation you'll see that my character which is rigged with riggify is playing this animation um however the riggify rig is not really animated yet meaning that there are no keyframes for it if i select any of these controls you'll see that there are no keyframes and if i look under bone constraints you'll see that these controls are constrained and they're constrained to the miximo rig so now to bake this action to the rigid5 rig there are two things that you can do one is to bake them manually and here xpikit has a little feature that can help you if you right click go to binding and select constraint controls that will select all of the controls that have constraints and then you can go to pause animation bake action and i think that was the workflow for earlier versions of xpikit but in the newest version of the add-on you have baking built right into the atom so if you right-click and go to animation bake constraint actions that will beg the animation but here's something important here i have one of the riggify controls selected and as you can see the armature which is my rigid rig is highlighted if i select one of the bones of the miximo armature then the miximo armature becomes highlighted and active so you need to have the miximo armature active and then right click animation bake constraint actions type to bake rigidify controls and then press bake and exit okay we wait a while and now if i select one of the riggify controls you'll see that there are keyframes and we have an action it's called action so let's rename it to silly dance rigify and also if you look on the bone constraints the bone constraints will be gone so basically that baked the animation to the rigid5 rig now we can even delete the miximo armature if i go back to the timeline um and select the rigid5 rig you'll see this button in the timeline if you press it it will limit the range of the keyframes to the available keyframes and this function is also available in the right click menu if you just go to pause mode and right click there is animation action range to scene which if i change the range here and go to animation actually arrange the scene it will be the same as pressing this button here is something else that expicate enables you to do and this may blow your mind so be prepared i'll go back to maximo and as you probably know miximo allows you to download individual animations but also animation packs so for example here's the couple era pack so i'm not quite sure why but i keep getting this loading screen however if i press download i can actually download the pack so i'm downloading it with the original pose and i click download okay so once it's downloaded i'll go back to blender and the couple error pack was downloaded as a zip file i'll just unzip it here okay so now i have a folder with all of the animations now i can go to blender and go to file import fbx go to my capoeira pack and here in this folder if i just press the a button i'll select all of the fbx files and i can import them in one go so this may take a while i'll reset the recording when everything has been imported okay so here is what we get and this looks really cool but now we can delete all of the imported armatures aside from one so i'll just select the armature 002 and then scroll down and shift and select the last armature and that selects everything in between i'm going to press delete and actually that wasn't it because the first amateur is this default t pose so i'll undo and i'll deselect i'll control click here and then i'll control click on the next one and delete okay and i also want to get rid of this additional model and armature so i'll right click on armature001 and delete hierarchy okay okay so now i'll select the rigify armature go to top sheet action editor and i will unlink this animation here and then it doesn't really matter that the character is in a specific pose i'll shift select the miximo armature go to pause mode right click and just as before bind to active armature again i want to bind rigify controls to miximo and i'll enable chain look at because it seems to produce better results okay so now we have this large list of animations 39 if i'm not mistaken that we downloaded from miximo basically the whole capoeira package so now just as before i can right click and go to animation bake constrained actions as you can see it says actions in plural so just click on that and set your type to bake to rigify controls and click bake and exit and this will take a while because it's going to bake as many as 39 animations so you may have to wait a while i'm going to stop the recording and then i'll let you know how long it took for me so it actually only took about a minute or so um and now if i go through my actions these sections with long names are the original ones that we got from miximo and if i scroll up i get these animations that are all called action action and zero zero one zero zero two and so on and if i focus on the rigify armature and apply any of these actions you'll see that these are actually the capoeira actions that have been baked for me so that is very cool but it may bother you that these actions do not have meaningful names and here is an amazing feature in xp kit it really shows how paolo the creator of xp kit is going the extra mile to make this add-on really user-friendly so if i select the riggify rig and go to pause mode right click and go to animation rename actions from fbx data and again i'll go to the capoeira pack and select everything and i could right click to exclude this first fpx which doesn't really contain an action and then i'll press the rename actions button and you'll see that my active action has been renamed based on the name of the fbx file and the way expected does this is it looks at the length of the animation it is very smart however some animations inevitably will have the same number of keyframes and then expect won't be able to tell which one is which in this case i'll go through my animations and here they are these animations that kept the action name are not yet renamed so i'll select this one i'll make it active and now if i go to the amateur tab you should find the expiquit utilities and that will show you that there are two animations with the same number of keyframes and you have to go through your animation and you kind of have to figure out what names should sit um now this capoeira pack was maybe a bad choice in this case because i don't know much about capoeira so i couldn't tell if this is a you or ginga variation but anyway let's say that it was the ginga variation i'm going to click on it and what this does is it renames this action to ginga and the other one which had the same number of keyframes to au okay so now i can go to another name um to another action that is named as action and in here i have three candidates i don't know which is which so i'll just select one at random and then move to another one okay and just like that you can keep selecting the unnamed animations and choosing the right candidate name okay so now everything is named properly i can delete this miximo armature i still have a bunch of these some miximo animations in the scene as you can see they're marked with zero which means that they'll be deleted once i save and reload this file so i'm going to save it ctrl s and then go to file revert and you'll see that all of these um mixing animations with the strange names are gone whereas the ones that we baked are still in the file that is because they are marked with this shield icon and that is again done smartly by xbikit okay so this is how i transferred 39 animations from maximo to grigify and it was all done without much effort okay so here is the second workflow that i was talking about earlier let's assume that you already have a character rigged with rigify like this and this is a standard rigid five rig with a face ringing a human with rigidify including the face has been covered a lot including on my channels so if you need to learn how to do that i'm going to share some links but now let's see how we can use expiquit to assign miximo animations to this riggify rig because xpikit has so many features there are different ways in which you can do this but here is what worked for me um i'm going to save this file and i'm going to create a separate temporary file where i can do whatever i like because i'll be changing things quite a lot so click save as and so i won't need this generated rig anymore i'm going to delete it and from the meshes i only want the body or everything else i can delete and i'm going to unhide the meta rigs so i still have my meta rig which in general if you're working with redefi i advise you to always keep a backup of your metarig if you don't have it just start from a new human metric and align it again with your character and you don't have to align the face as you'll see because i'm going to delete it so i'll isolate the meta rig go to edit mode and i want to get rid of the face so i'm going to select these hidden neck bones hide them with h and then select all face balls and delete them all h to unhide and here i actually don't need two neck bones so i'm going to select the connection between the two bones and press ctrl x and that combines them into a single neck bone these breast bones i don't need in the pelvis bones and the heel bones i'm also going to delete okay slash to go out of local mode then we'll go to pause mode and here i'll use an xp8 feature i'll right click go to conversion convert bone names and i'll convert my riggify meta rig to miximo and that will rename the meteric bones to the traditional miximo bones as you'll see the arm is called left arm whereas in rigify it was called upper arm dot l okay next go to object mode select the mesh shift select the armature control p parent with automatic weights so that will parent the mesh to the armature and i really don't care about the deformation that that creates i only want a mesh that is weighted to this amateur because mixing always needs an armature and a mesh and what this gives me is a simple rig that i can import in miximo and also it has the exact same articulation points i mean the exact same joint positions as my rigifi rig so now i can export this i'll get rid of this widget collections that i still have here and now i can save my temporary file and file export fpx and i'm going to export this temporary file i'll use the default fbx settings okay in miximo upload character upload the fbx that i just created and because i imported a character that already has bones i won't need to rig it with miximo it's already good to go so i'll click next and confirm and here is um some animation already applied to this character i'm going to download it okay and in blender i can save my temporary scene just in case and then i'll go back to my rigged character import on fbx and this is the file that i downloaded i'm going to deselect the armature and delete the mesh so select the rigidify rig shift select the miximo armature go to pause mode right click binding bind to active amateur i want to bind rigify controls to miximo and enable chain lookup and now it is already working and just as before make sure that the rig that we got from miximo is active right click animation bake constraint actions we want to bake the rigifi controls bake and exit when the baking is done i can delete the imported armature and i'm going to have to assign the action dope shade action editor and here's the action that i baked give it a proper name and you're done if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe and if you would like to watch unreleased cg dive content and support the channel consider becoming a subscriber on go road or patreon as 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Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 59,404

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: ars_rEC3oP8

Length: 26min 16sec (1576 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022