How to use Rigify rig in Cascadeur (from Blender to Cascadeur and back)

in this video I'll show you a technique for using regified generated rig inside cast cutter and then we target your animation back to the original Armature in blender the cool thing about this method is that it allows you to make adjustments to your animation using both the FK and the ik controllers as an example I'll be using the Spiderman model rigged with regifi created by shadatar and it's available for free to download and also a huge thanks to cgidi for his amazing videos which really helped me create this tutorial before we dive into it let's quickly run through the workflows so you know exactly what to expect first we will duplicate the ring and we will be exporting this duplicated regulator and we will need to get rid of every bone except the form bones clear the constraints and the hierarchy of the bones then move it from blender to cascader then rigging it in Cascada and then moving it back to black blender and at the end retarget it using the Rococo weapon just to quickly explain why we need all of these steps is because rigi 5 wasn't made to use it outside blender and the deformation Bones have an unconventional hierarchy that are parented or constrained to the different control and mechanism bones let's get started fixing the Armature so first I will select everything in this hierarchy and duplicate it in object mode with Shifty so I have an identical rig and I will put it in a new collection and I'll disable the collection of the original rig so I won't accidentally select it and one other thing with this model if you turn on face orientation you can see one of the eye has flip normals so I will just quickly fix it I will rename this duplicated rig also and I will go to edit mode and we will need to delete all bones except the bones on this layer so make sure you have all layers selected except the third layer 30. and select all the day and delete them some of the bones are not selectable so they are not deleted you can turn on selection here and then make them selectable and also delete them so before fixing the hierarchy I will go to pose mode and remove all the constraints and I also want to unlock all modes because you can see they you cannot move Rotator scare these bones because they are locked that's a really easy fix just select all of them and with by holding alt you can just turn on everything and now if you try to move the spine bone you can see the legs and the arms are not parented to the spine you will need to fix this go to edit mode and I will turn on symmetric changes so I only need to point one side select the hip and the first leg bone and then the first spine bone and with Ctrl P present it with keep offset and now the other side is also prevented do the same with the clavicle and the breast prevent it to the upper chest bone we need to put in the first arm bone to the clavicle and also the finger joints are pointed to the hand bone but there are Palm bones and the finger should be pointed to these problems [Music] and I will just move around the bones so I can see if they are parented correctly and it seems fine so we can go to exporting it I will select everything in this collection and in fbx export I will only export the selected objects which are Armature mesh objects I don't need anything else I don't need animation I will keep the leaf bones because I found it easier to rig that way in Cascada and you can check the phone bones but everything here is a different bomb and save this file entering this model in cascader I will create a new scene and import the model that we just exported we will go to rigging mode and I will use Quick clicking tool and quickly going to want automatically recognize this bonds so you need to manually drag and drop all of them I will go over the spine first because that's the trickiest part I think first we need the spine bone for the pelvis the stomach is the spine one and I found the chest should start at spine too and the spine tree also belongs to the chest but it starts its spine too the neck has two bone spine four and spine five so you need to start the spine four and the head is spine six then I can drag and drop the right side of the character for the hands I have a shoulder right upper arm forearm and hand and then the right leg yeah and make sure that you are not using this zero zero one suffix bones because they will be the twist bones later and actually I will do the twist balls right now the tight and the shin and then the upper arm has a Twist bone and the forearm also with this zero zero one suffix and can be mirrored as well and the fingers are pretty straightforwards one goes to the first the two goes to the second and three goes to the Third and I will create a mirror object for the left hand I will export it as a Json file and you will be able to download it on the link in the description and import it here and now I can generate the rig elements and I will keep editing because I will need to fix the rigid body sizes [Music] yeah it should be good enough and I can generate the rig and as you can see the rig works and I just created this animation quickly so I can show retargeting with the Rococo addon in blender we will need to export this animation as an fbx I will already skip up [Music] for itargeting you will need the Rococo add-on that you can download for free from their website and once it's downloaded in blender go to edit preferences install and search for the zip you just downloaded and install the add-on and you will need to select the checkbox here okay so import the exported animation which was the skip up and in the import settings I will ignore the response because I exported with Leaf bones and everything else can be cut the default I will just delete the mesh and we will need to retarget from this Armature to the rigifier mature I will go to pose mode with this Armature open the Rococo Adam and I will need to sign in and after you are signed in you will find this retarget option and select the source as a imported Armature and the target will be the rigifier mature and now we can build the bone list for retargeting this automatic recognition doesn't work well in this case so we will need to clear everything and manually select all of the control bones that will be retargeted to make it easier make your control bones visible and also the deformation Bones on layer 30. and this way you can see which control bone belongs to which the formation boom first I will select the FK control bones and I will add the ik control bones at the end the pelvis should be this torso object and then spine zero one is this spine fk01 spine two is spine of K2 and then for the neck we will need this snack bone which is spine four and spine six is the head shoulders are the shoulders let's put this straight forward and we will first retarget to the FK Armature which are these green bones and the fingers are also straight forward just make sure you are selecting the correct side for the fingers so now the dot has suffix first foreign targeted [Music] if you animated them the pelvis are not needed and the legs are also needed type FK shame fkl food fklm 2 f k l okay I just realized I had another version of the lakoku addon in the newest version you cannot custom entries and you will need to add multiple entries to retarget to the ik Armature again CG dive has a video about this that I will link in the description but in my case I will only need the food ik controller and this type controller and the Army Key and this upper Mikey so I will add four custom bones and I will need the upper arm left the hand left the upper or right hand right and actually I will need four more for the legs [Music] and this will be the upper arm ik left the hand ik left upper my K right and and ik right then tight ik left foot ik left tight ik right and foot okay right seems about height and now I can retarget the animation I will unhide this imported Armature and if I now play the animation it should work [Music] so now the ik is selected so I can change the animation here with the ik controllers but if I want to I can switch to FK and then work with the F key on the right arm and it makes it really easy to switch between ik and FK even though the two armatures are aligned perfectly the retargeted animation is not perfect that's because the first spine bone and the Torso controller are not at the same place exactly the only way I found to have the exact same animation as we had in Cascada is that I use the duplicated Armature selected it then to the action editor and selected the imported action and this way the animation is exactly the same as it was in cascader if you find a better solution for retargeting I would be really curious so please let me know in the comments and hope this video was helpful thanks for watching bye [Music]

Channel: Aron Nemeth

Views: 22,449

Keywords: rigify in cascadeur, blender to cascadeur, cascadeur to blender, retarget animation to rigify, blender to cascadeur and back

Id: kmA4zBieXx8

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023