Retargeting using Auto-Rig Pro (COMPLETE guide) - Blender 2.8, 2.9, 3.0

this video is about the retargeting features of auto rig pro auto rig pro is a paid add-on so if you don't already own it you probably want to know is it worth it is it worth the 40 dollars that you have to spend on it the short answer of course is it depends it depends on your needs financial situation and so on but overall it is a great add-on with a lot of features that simplify most areas of the rigging process it's intuitive it's robust so in my humble opinion it's easily worth the 40 bucks if you go to the blender market and take a look at the products that are popular this week you'll see that autoric pro is consistently among them week after week so people obviously buy it a lot and the add-on also has a 5 star rating many people have asked me to compare rigify and autoric pro the thing is though that wouldn't be a fair comparison rigify is only an automatic rig generator in auto rig pro on the other hand regeneration is just one of many features it has skinning features a bomb picker streamlined export to game engines a bunch of other small features that i haven't looked into too deeply and of course the retargeting tool which is one of the best on the market so if you only compare the rig generation tools then i'd say rigify and altery pro are about equal it's not that simple but i don't want to go into too much detail here i'll do a separate video on that but overall autoric pro is a much more feature-rich and versatile tool than rigify and regarding the retargeting features of autoric pro they are excellent some of its strengths the addon is easy to use stable it produces great retargeting results it is fast and it has dedicated tools for ik retargeting which i haven't seen in many other tools and also there are features for tweaking the retargeted motion which can also come in handy the only real limitation that i can think of is that you cannot create complex relationships between the bones of the source and target rig when retargeting that's okay it is not a deal breaker in most cases in their workarounds but it may leave advanced users wanting a few more features so you can buy autoric pro on the blender market and then you'll be able to download it the only thing to note is that the zip file you'll download is not the actual add-on instead it contains the main add-on and some additional tools that i'm not going to cover so unzip these files and then you can install autoric pro master.zip just like ara add-ons without unzipping it go to blender go to edit preferences add-ons click install find the add-on click on the install button and then also activate the add-on okay for the rest of the video i'll assume that you have bought and installed the autoric pro addon so first let's try to retarget a mocap action to a standard autoric pro humanoid rig in many ways this is probably the easiest retargeting task that you can do with auto rig pro so here i have an unrigged character in the tipos and i'm going to quickly rig it with the autoric pro smart features so go to autoric pro smart select my character get selected objects i'm going to go for full body in here head neck edge in head shoulders head wrist spine root ankles and i'll skip the fingers because my mocap data doesn't have any fingers anyway face setup i'm definitely not doing and i'll simply press go i'll take a quick look at this meta rig and see if i need to adjust anything it looks fairly good okay and then maybe i want to fully get rid of these fingers and the correct way to do this with autorepro is to select your arm and go to autoreg pro limb options and just deselect all of these fingers options and they'll disappear and same on the other side and then i'll match the rig go to the skin section select my character shift select my rig and for engine i like voxelized and with these settings i'll just click bind i'll wait a couple of seconds but i really like the results that this binding algorithm produces it's quite a bit better than blender's automatic weights so let's go to pause mode and here my character is already deforming and pay attention to the fact that both arms and legs are in ik mode by default autoric pro has tools to change from ik to fk at any point they are in the tool rig main properties settings so here i can switch my leg from ik to fk and same for the arm so i'll keep the default ik settings and reset all pause and now let's go back to the autoric pro tab and focus on the actual retargeting or remap as it is called in autoric pro as in other similar targeting systems you first need to set your source armature and then your target armature the source is my mocap rig mocap is simply the name i've given to this rig it can be called armature or source or whatever name you gave to your armature the target trick will be the rig generated by auto rig pro by default auto rig pro calls it rig so let's select that and then we get this auto scale button which you should press this will adjust the scale of the source rig and i'll explain why we do that later in the video next we need to build a bone list and here's the great thing about using the standard humanoid rig in auto rig pro with the retargeting settings of the same add-on because the features work together nicely everything is almost set up for us if i click retarget now i'll get a little area that says the root bone must be marked first so what is the root bond in the source armature the root is this bone the hips that controls all of the other bones and in auto rig pro it is this bone the root master and here is the root master in the bone list so i need to enable set as root for this bone again this is the quick and easy version of using these features i'll explain them in more detail later and now if i press retarget i'll get this menu and i just need to press ok and my action will be retargeted it's all looking good uh if you go to pause mode one thing that you'll notice is that the arms and legs are now switched to fk so auto rig pro understood that it should retarget to the fk controls of its own rig and it automatically switched to fk very nice workflow and now actually if we go to mapping presets and click this triangle here and choose miximo ik we'll get a bunch of warnings but don't worry about this it is just because this source rig that i got from miximo is missing the finger bones but that won't be a problem in your targeting workflow and now if i click retarget again you'll see that we have the same motion but now in pause mode the legs and arms are actually in ik mode and that is very nice having these limbs in ik mode can be very useful for cleaning up and editing this action so once you have everything set up you can go to your source rig and here i'll switch to dope sheet action editor and i have a bunch of other actions that i can use with this source rig for example a kick i'll auto scale it again and simply press retarget okay and now my character will be kicking and all of these retargeted actions will be in the scene autorek pro takes the original name of the action and adds remap to it so here in the action list i can just type remap and i'll find all the actions that i have retargeted so if you want to keep these actions you should actually press this shield icon here okay then i can switch to my dance action save it as well and now both actions will be saved with this file so these are the basics of retargeting to an auto rig pro rig using the auto rig pro retargeting features if that's all you want then you can end this video here but i would still advise you to watch until the end because these automations that auto rig pro does are based a lot on naming conventions so if you modify your autoric pro rig or if your source rig is not from miximo or rococo or unity or unreal then things may not work so i recommend you stick around until the end we'll learn how these bone pairs are set up we will learn what set is root actually does how we can retarget to ik here we just did it with the automatic preset but you can have fine control over that and you'll also learn how to retarget to other rigs that are not from auto rig pro that can be riggify or really any rig that you have okay let's continue with another example and this one will be much more custom we won't be relying on the automations done by auto rig pro too much as usual in this series i'm keeping things simple and adding complexity step by step so here even though things are getting more customized this example that i have is probably the simplest form of retargeting that we can do and that is retargeting to an fk rig meaning that this character is rigged with a very simple rig in which each bone is parented to another bone and there are no complex relationships between these bones there are no constraints no ik nothing and also the character by default is in the t pose and that is the simplest example because the source armature is also an fk rig and it's rest position is also a t-pose about 99 of all motion capture data that you'll find has a t-pose as a rest pose i'll switch back to pose position and let's start retargeting so in the autoreg pro remap section i'll set my source amateur which is my mocap rig and the target armature is my fk rig i'll then auto scale the mocap rig so what auto scale does is it tries to compensate from the size difference between the two rigs and that will ensure that the retargeting is correct this mainly has to do with your targeting of the root of the armature if the scale is not fixed correctly then the targeted motion may appear to move too much or too little in space but let's continue and press build bone list in here autorec pro should attempt to match the corresponding bones between the sony's rig and the target rig however it doesn't seem to do anything if you've seen my rococo video the rococo addon seems to do a better job at this i think it tries to look at the names of the bones and matches them accordingly and sometimes it makes mistakes but at least it tries to do something whereas autorepro just kind of goes i don't know dude do it yourself maybe maybe i'm doing something wrong but that's the result i'm getting so i'll do it manually and that will be good practice and also when we are done i'm going to show you how you can save a preset so that you only have to do this process once per rig so i'm going to select both armatures by shift clicking on them and then go to pause mode and that will allow me to select bones of both armatures and check their names over here in the upper left corner so the bone mapping process so the bone matching process all we need to do for that is to find the corresponding bones between the two rigs and match them in this list so on the top of the list we have the head bone of the source rig so we need to patch it to the head bone in the target rig if i select the head bone in the target rig and check its name i'll see that it's called head so i'll scroll down a little bit and here in this area i'm going to start typing head and select the head bone and it appeared over here the next bone in the list is the head top bone and as i explained in the previous video this is a bone that you don't really need i could go to edit mode and delete it but in this case i'll use it as an example to let you know that you don't really have to match this bone if they're bones in the source amateur that you don't want to retarget to then you can just skip them so let's move on and the next bone in the list is the hips and that is the root of the armature very important bone to much correctly and here is the root of my target rig it is also called hips so let's type hips here select it and something specific to auto rig pro is that when you match the root bone you also need to explicitly mark it here in the options is the root so for the hips check set is root so the hips was the only special bone where we needed to do something special for the rest you just need to go through this list make sure that you understand which bone you're trying to match find the corresponding bone in the target rig and enter its name in the field here so here we're trying to match the left arm and the left arm is actually the upper arm in the target rig that is the upper arm dot l so i'm going to find it in here and select it and i'll just keep doing that for the rest of the bones so it's important to know the naming conventions of both rigs and if you don't just click on the bones and check their actual names my source rig has one neck bone whereas my target rig has two i'm simply going to select the first neck bone and ignore the second one so i matched all bones except for the second neck bone which is fine because it is controlled by its parent which is the first neck bone and also these two pelvis bones are not much to anything but that's okay because they are only here for the purpose of making my weight painting a little bit easier and they're not supposed to move so they can simply follow their parent and that will be fine with that i'm ready to click retarget press ok and if i play the action the motion will be retargeted correctly and that's it about retargeting the simple fk rig now setting up these bone pairs was a little bit annoying but if we scroll down a little bit we'll find the mapping presets and there is an import and export button here i can export a preset and anytime i have these two armatures or armatures with identical naming conventions then i can simply import my preset again and all the bone pairs will be set up for me so let's export and i'll call this fk preset and save it and we'll see how we can import this in the next step so let's move to the next example i'm going to hide this collection and i'm going to unhide the apollos collection and here i have an almost identical rig the only difference is that instead of a t-pose it is in enables by default and that does matter in um retargeting so first i'm going to change my target armature to the fk a pose rig so that autoric pro is retargeting to the correct rig and click auto scale and again build bone list and again auto rig pro will reset all of these names but now because this rig has identical names to the previous one the only difference between them is the default pose but the names are the same i can go down here click import find my fk preset choose it and there we go all of our bone players are set up for us and that is not just the names if i click on hips you'll see that it is already set as root so all these additional options are also exported and imported with these mapping presets so as far as this is concerned i'm ready to retarget so let's give it a try i'll click retarget and press ok and my dancing motion was retargeted but you can clearly see that the arms are behaving incorrectly and that has to do with the difference in rest pose the source armature is in tepos the target armature is in a pose so that difference between the initial pose remains throughout the whole retargeted motion so let's undo and see what we can do about this i'll select my source rig or actually i don't really have to select it and scroll down in the mapping area of autoric pro and down here we have the redefine rest pose button but before i click it i'm going to make a duplicate of this armature that i have just shifty and move it to the side and you'll see why in a second so now i'm going to click the redefine response button and here you'll get two options rest pose and current pose and this confused me a little bit at first and that is maybe because the first retargeting tool that i used was rococo which has similar options but they work differently here basically choosing between rest pose and current pose before you press ok simply defines whether autoreg pro will set your armature in the default pose in the rest pose or if you want to leave this current pose that you have right here so in most cases you're going to want to go to the rest pose and edit that so i'll press ok and here i have the source armature in its default t pose and i want to change it to more of a naples like my target rig so the cool thing about autoric pro is that it has tools to automate this process i can simply select any bone that i want to match to the target rig and press copy selected bones rotations so in theory i can select all bones and press copy selected bonus rotations and that will change all of the bones in a pose that is more like the one from the target rig but i find that that's not really necessary so i'm going to undo control z and i'm simply going to select my upper arms and use this feature for some reason i'm finding out that the rest of the bones are not so problematic but the arms really need to be matched correctly but if you're not happy with your targeting results you can go back to this part of the process and try to match other bones and see if that gives you better results so once you're happy with the pose you have to press the apply button and it's important to understand what this does this actually sets a completely new rest pose for this armature and that is a little bit problematic if you have more than one action i will switch back to pause position and let's find another action that i have for this rig the jumping jacks show the problem clearly so switch to it and let's switch this armature as well which is still in t-balls to jumping jacks and scrub through and you'll see that when the arms are down in this armature which shows the correct action the arms point downwards and with this armature which we edited with the autored pro tools the irons will be clipping into the body and that's not nice so i'm going to undo and so that's a problem that i find with the system when you change the rest pose with these tools it fixes the active action so my dancing action will be all right even though the uh pose was changed but all other actions that i had for this armature will not work so always keep a copy of this armature if you have more than one action and i really wish there was a better workflow in this area and and i'm going to ask the creator of water rig pro if there is maybe i'm missing something and if there is i'm going to let you know uh about it with an annotation or i'll make another segment in this video but anyway now that i have the rest pose fixed i can retarget and the arms will behave correctly now i'm seeing a little bit of a problem here the fingers are flipped and the target motion seems to be floating a little bit above the ground so i think this has to do with the scale auto scale does a good job but it's not perfect so i'm going to scale this source amateur up a little bit and retarget again and now the total problem is fixed and there is a little bit less of a floating if you followed along until now then good work by now you should know some of the most important basics of using autoric pro for targeting to any rig so in the next step we're going to up the difficulty a little bit and we are going to retarget to a refi rig i've seen a lot of people having problems with retargeting to rigify rigs but i think these problems come down to not understanding the retargeting process and not understanding your rigify rig enough so let's switch to the rigidify rig i'll hide my apos rig and switch to rigify and here i have a rig rigged with refi and it is also in the t-pose so i want to avoid these complications that we get by working with non-t-pose characters and just focus on refi okay so i already prepared this rig a little bit but let's actually start from scratch so i'm going to unhide the metal rig which i still have in the scene and i recommend that you always keep your metal rig around do not delete it and simply go to the armature tab and generate the rig again and by regenerating i reset all of my settings so by default the rigidify rig is in ik mode for both arms and legs and one of the easiest way to retarget to a rigifi rig is to simply switch all limbs to fk mode i'm also going to handle ik in this video and actually auto rig pro has great features for that it's the only add-on that i know of that has dedicated features for retargeting to ik controls and they work really well but for now let's keep it simple and retarget to the fk controls so i'll clear all transforms and then under item i want to go to my arm and switch it to fk the other arm also to fk leg to fk and the other leg to fk and now i can hide the layers that i don't need i don't need the fingers ik controls and tweak controls i'll also hide the metal rig then we can go to auto rig pro and change the target armature to the rigify rig and build bone list again and then we're going to have to set these bone pairs manually again some of them will be simple to set up and others may be a little bit more confusing so let's go through them one by one for the head we have a dedicated head bone so let's just select that hit top i'm going to skip again hips this is an important one again the root so what do we re target the root to we have to map that to the control that moves the whole rig with it and if we just move the torso bone you'll see that it moves the whole of the rig along with it so in here i'm going to search for torso and select it the arms should be easy to select you just have to keep the naming conventions of riggify in mind so the upper arm is called upper arm fk lower arm is forearm fk and the hand is hand fk and is similar with the legs the upper leg is called thigh and the lower leg is called shin but the important part is to retarget to the fk controls so i'm going to go through the left part of the body quickly now i want to map the neck of the target rig and we have a neck bone a neck control bone in the riggify rig so i'm going to use that and here's something that you you could do go to item and switch the neck follow and hit follow options to one what that will do is if i rotate some of the spine bones the head and the neck will simply rotate with them if i switch them to zero or less than one you'll see that they kind of keep their original orientation which may create an inconsistency in your targeting as much as possible we want to make this rig behave as an fk rig so set that to 1 and then we'll go back to autoric pro and now i have to set the limbs on the right side which is exactly the same thing as what we did for the left side so i'm going to go through this quickly again making sure that i retarget to the fk controls and now we came to the spine bones the source rig has three spine balls and the riggify rig has these four spine bones these circular widgets are spine control bones and so we're simply going to skip the first one because it is controlled by the torso anyway and we are going to retarget to the remaining three bones and they are called spine fk001002 and zero zero three and now i could try to retarget and it will let me know that i haven't set a root bone so let's go to the torso which should be the red bone i forgot to check the checkbox and now i can retarget and things will look almost okay except for the arms again and the problem is that i already changed this rig to a napos and but i'm retargeting to a t-pose so let's undo and instead of fixing this again i'm going to use my every copy which is mockup001 so let's select it in here and try to retarget now and let's play through this and this looks almost okay i'm noticing a jerky motion in the shoulder so let's see what this is about so when something like this happens most likely i have messed something up here in the bone matching process and this seems to have to do with the shoulder so let's see the shoulders we can also use the search field here so let's search for shoulder and yes it seems that i matched the shoulder to the left toe so the toe should be matched to the toe in the ring fire rig toe dot l and the left shoulder is now matched to nothing so let's give it shoulder.l and now retarget again and our shoulder problems are fixed and for the most part this looks okay but if you really pay attention there is a little bit of a sinking of the feet if we compare this to the fk retargeting and we can kind of take the fk retarget as a ground truth and you may notice that the feet in rigify are a little bit less stable than that in than those in the fk rig and the reason for that is i already explained this in the rococo video but by default this human rig that refi produces divides the spine into two parts the first two spine bones control the lower body and the next two control the upper body and the spine bones in the source rig are in a straight fk chain so there are two ways to fix this i can unhide my meta rig go to pose mode select the first spine bone go to the bone properties rig type and here's the spirit position option by default it is set to two and that creates this division uh right here in the center of the spine and if we set it to one then this division will happen at the end of the first spine bone and that will fix our problem so i'll just generate i have to switch my rig again to fk hide the meta rig retarget again and here's the result and it is practically identical to the fk rig and here if i go to pause mode you'll see that now this second bone controls the upper body the first one still controls the lower body but we are not retargeting to it anyway so that's fine and if you want to keep the original behavior of the rigifi rig which is having this spine bone spine bone control the lower body then we can do that but it is a little bit complicated i came up with a special technique which involves a separate intermediate rig i'm going to show it to you right away i'll unhide the meta rig again set the pivot position to 2 again in generate okay and i could create this intermediate rig manually and i mean i could really go uh and create a new single bone and start building the armature that i need but that would be quite cumbersome so a better approach is to use our existing rig so i'll just duplicate it go to pause mode and start selecting the bones that i want to extract which are the fk bones i could hide the layers that i don't need select all the bones that i want to extract go to edit mode press p and separate them into a separate armature and then i have to clean up this armature and constrain the original material to this new armature and i showed this process in the rococo video so i'm not going to repeat it here because we have a better solution blender boy who created the game rig tools add-on also started working on retarget helper and retarget helper will be an add-on containing kind of random scripts that may help you in your retaliating workflows it is not going to be a full retargeting solution it will just contain scripts that may support you so i'm going to delete these additional armatures that i created go to my original one go to pose mode hide the layers that i don't need select the bones that i want to extract and constrain and the root is not one of them so the bones that i want are the bones that we have been constraining so far the fk leg bones the torso bone all the spine bones the arm bones on both sides the shoulder bones neck bone and head bone and now with retarget helper i can just click extract and constrain i can name my rig press ok and that will extract this armature based on my selection and not just that but if i go to pause mode for this new armature and move it you will see that it also moves the rigidify bones with it and the character is not deforming that is probably because it's still in ik mode let's switch to fk and now my riggify rig is constrained to this new armature and it moves with it you know the only manual step that we need to take is that we need to manually fix any uh parenting or hierarchy issues with this extracted armature the add-on doesn't do this automatically at least not at this point and so in pause mode i can check the hierarchy i need to make sure that the spine is parented correctly and the hierarchy goes up like this so this bone needs to be parented to the one below it and this one to the one below it and this one to the torso control and the legs will also be parented to the torso and i can see that the toes are parented to the spine bone they need to be parented to the foot so let's enable x mirror in parent and now they are parented correctly okay i can see that the shoulders are disconnected as well all right and this is looking good i'm going to clear all transforms and now i can go to audrey pro and i'm going to change my target iron material from the riggify rig to the intermediate rig and because i extracted these bones from the rigifi rig they have the same names so i don't need to build the bone list i think i can just use the same names that i already used and i'll simply try to click retarget and something didn't quite look right and it seems that the torso is not set as root so let's set it as root and try to retarget again and now the retarding looks correct and if you pay attention you'll see that the feet are not sinking as they were before even though we reset the original behavior of this um redefine rig in which the upper body and lower body are kind of split in the middle but because the rigified rig is constrained to the simpler rig we are able to retarget the motion correctly you know this rigidify rig still only moves based on constraints to finalize the motion to move the motion really on the rigified rig we need to go to pause mode select all of these bones go to pause animation bake action and bake with these options press ok and that will bake the whole action onto the actual rigidify rig as you can see here in pose mode it all bones have keyframes and also if we look under bone constraints you'll see that the constraint that used to constrain this rigifi rig to the intermediate rig were removed so this intermediate rig no longer controls the riggify rig and we can delete it and that's it now this motion is fully transferred to the rigidify rig let's start talking about retargeting to ik controls and this is an area in which autoric pro shines it has dedicated tools for targeting to ik which i haven't seen in other retargeting solutions i'm still evaluating some of the add-ons so maybe some of them support this but so far i've only seen it in auto rig pro and here i'm back in the scene where i rigged a character with the autoric pro automatic rigging feature which created this default human rig and in the beginning of the autoric pro video i already showed you a way in which you can retarget to ik controls using the mapping presets here and of course the problem with these presets is that they're limited to miximo and rococo for ik so i really want to show you how we can do this manually so that you understand the process and that you can use it on any source rig and also on other non-autoric projects like rigifi custom rigs and so on and i'll show examples of that as well but first let's start with this autoric pro rig i'm going to select it go to pause mode and under tool settings i'm going to reset all pose and this will bring the autorepro rig in the default position and arms and legs will be in ik so this is a default autoric pro rig that you would naturally see and to make things more interesting i'm going to get rid of this amateur which is from miximo which uh as you know autoric pro recognizes and i'm going to replace it with another mocap data something that i got from the mocap utd library which is a lesser known library so i'm pretty sure that autoric pro doesn't have any presets for it so i'll delete this armature here and import an fpx and find my file from the library selected enable automatic bone orientation and import and here we have the file and the length of the animation is like 2 000 frames and at first it stays in t-balls these frames we can definitely get rid of to make it a little bit simpler and then at the end it also kind of goes into t-pose so i'm going to delete these frames just select them and delete them and also the initial ones and then i'll select all of these frames and with g move them to the beginning and then also let's switch to timeline and set this timeline to 1450 frames or so and now this animation that we have is still kind of long but that's okay i guess this will allow us to test the performance of all direct pro so let's go to auto rig pro and set a new armature which is just called armature as the source rig and let's try to auto scale and for some reason the armature got much bigger than i expected if you check the tooltip of auto scale you will read that this function is based on the rest position and if the rest position is incorrect then it may not work correctly so let's switch to rest position and see what we have and here we have something really weird the rest position is with the character lying down let's go back to post position and here we can use the redefine response function of autoric pro i'll click on it use rest pose and then i'll select all bones and from the side view i'm going to rotate 90 degrees and then move the rig up until the feet are on the ground and click apply and now if i click auto scale the rig will be scaled accordingly so earlier i mentioned some disadvantages of this redefine response feature but here we can also see how effective it can be here's the rest position it has been fixed and there are a bunch of unnecessary bones in this rig that will complicate the retarding process so i'm going to go to edit mode and this end bone of the head i want to delete these finger bones i also want to delete i'll leave the hand bone here also on the other side and this toe and bone delete and now if i build my bone list the list will only consist of bones that i actually want and the bone matching seems to be almost okay the hips is much to the root bone which is fine i just want to set it as root and the only problem that i noticed is that the matching of the spine bones doesn't seem quite correct so let's select both rigs and go to pose mode and let's see um here we have four spine bones whereas autoric pro has three so there are different ways to handle this but the way i'll do it is that i'll ignore the first spine bone so i'll just remove the entry for this first spine bone and then go to the second one and this one is correctly matched already the next one also correctly matched and the third one is incorrect i'm going to switch it to spine 0 3 dot x no d c spine 0 3 dot x okay this bone i can also select it and use the eyedropper here and this should be fine however autoric pro automatically matched the fk bones but that's okay i can use this to show you a special feature of auto rig pro so i'm going to try to retarget and as you can see we're going to be retargeting around 1400 frames so let's see how long it takes for autoredpro to do that and the retargeting seems correct it looks quite good however everything is in ak mode so what we can do about this is we can go to tool pause mode of course and select any limb control for example this one in here next to snap ik to fk i can click on this gears icon and that will show additional options and one of them is bake ik to fk this is a special option in autoric pro which allows us to basically convert fk action to ik action so let's click this and i'm going to set the end frame to 1450 or so and press ok and wait a while and the process is done and it took a while but now we have this action in ik mode if i scrub through you'll see that the action is still there but the controls are in ik mode which is great so this is one way to get ik motion on your autoric pro rig you can just convert it with this function the only problem with this is that it is slow autored pro is a little bit faster than rigify rigify has a very similar feature which is even slower but still overall it is slow so if we can we should try to avoid it so let's see how we can retarget directly to the ik controls and save a lot of time i'm going to undo and i want to have my rig again in the default position go to rotary pro again i already have my bone list so now let's try to set things up so so that the motion is retargeted directly to the ik controls the key for this with auto rig pro is to map the hands and feet correctly and to set up some special ik settings so here in the bone list i'm going to remove all entries that have to do with arms and legs and hands and feet and now let's try to set them up and we'll basically ignore arms upper arm lower arm and so on and also the legs thigh and shin we're going to ignore and we'll just set up hands and feet so let's select both rigs go to pause mode and here auto rig pro has a very handy feature i can simply select a bone that i want to focus on and click this button with the two arrows and that will focus me on this bone that i have selected and now to this left hand i want to match the ik control for the left hand in the auto rig pro rig so i can simply select it and use the eyedropper here and that will fill in this field and then i have to let auto rig pro that this is an ik control so click ok and now auto rig pro also wants to know the poll target for this ik control and that is this pull target here so select it and click the eyedropper so i can do this for the right arm as well select it on the source rig focus on it select it on autoric pro eyedropper enable ik select the pole eyedropper in the pole field then i can do the same for the feet select the left foot focus on it select it in auto rig pro eyedropper select the pole target eyedropper and right foot as well focus on it select it eyedropper ik select the pole target eyedropper and with that things should actually be set up correctly because because in ik mode the entire arm moves solely based on this ik control in the poll target so let's clear all transforms looks like i still have this um dancing action active on the auto rig pro rig i can remove it but actually it doesn't matter auto rig pro can handle this and now i can try to retarget and we are targeting 1438 frames so let's see how long it will take okay that didn't take too long and here we are we have the action retargeted looking good and the whole ring is in ik mode legs arms okay so these are the basics of retargeting to ik controls with autoric pro i think it was fairly simple we have to retarget to the ik controls of each limp and we also have to correctly set up its poll target autoric pro will take care for the rest for us and you'll see that it doesn't matter that this rig is auto rig pro this same approach will work for every ik rig that you can find as long as it has poll targets okay next i'll show the process of retargeting to ik controls with rigify here i have a rigidify rig in its default state if i go to pause mode the arms are in ik mode and so are the legs so now i can set my source armature which is my mocap rig and let's set another action for it so that we don't always use this dancing action something like this and the target armature will be my rigafy rig i'm going to auto scale and build bone list also under item i'm going to clean up my rig in this case i want to get rid of the fk controls and i'm going to leave the ik controls so in auto rig pro let's start setting things up how much head to head hips to torso and set it as root as before and let's skip arms hands feet and legs and do them at the end so i'll scroll down here's the shoulder i'm going to set it up to the shoulder neck i can set to the neck bone the right shoulder i'm going to set up as well and the spine bones these ones will be set up exactly as we set them up in the fk rig so now let's start setting up the arms and legs and again i'm only going to focus on the hands and feet and i'm going to skip upper arm lower arm thigh engine just like in auto rig pro so let's select both rigs go to pose mode select the hand bone focus on it and now i want to match it to the left hand ik control so eye dropper here enable ik and now we want to pull and oh no riggify doesn't have any pole targets well actually it does i can just go to item and with this ik widget selected i'm going to click toggle poll and that will enable the poll target so rigify can use this widget and it can also have a pole whatever you prefer so i'm going to switch everything to pole targets because that's what auto rig pro works with legs and arms and now i can keep retargeting i can go back to auto rig pro select my poll target for this arm and use the eyedropper and let's set up the other arm select this hand bone focus on it select the ik control for it eyedropper enable ik grab the pole target eyedropper same with the feet select the foot focus on it select the corresponding ik control eyedropper enable ik grab the ik pole target these pole targets here kind of oval up but i can select them and move them to see which one i want and this is the one that i want here so use the eye dropper and same on the other side and something that i haven't set up yet are the tools so let's find the toes here it is toe base and i want to start typing tall and in rigify the toes are not dependent on ik or fk mode the same bone is used in both so i'll simply select the toe dot l control and confirm and then find the right toe as well and set it to tall.r and that's it um i think i can try to retarget now and see let's see what happens okay i think this is looking good so there you go i think you can see how the process is exactly the same whether you have an auto rig pro rig or a riggify rig in a second i'll show you another example with a completely custom ik rig and it's going to be exactly the same so again make sure that you understand your rig retarget to the ik controls set them up as ik and also set up the poll targets and retargeting to ik controls should work okay let's go to my custom rig here's my custom break the legs and arms are in ik mode and i have pulled targets so i should be able to retire to this easily here i have my source armature i'm going to give it an action let's see what i have maybe a sneaky walk all right and now i'm going to set up my source armature it is already set up and let's set up the target armature as well click auto scale build bone list and now i can start matching the bones again it is always important to understand your rig so here for the head bone i have a head bone in the my in my custom rig so i'll set it up again then we have the hips and this is my hips control so i'm going to use the eye dropper to fill in this field and set it as route as always so again i'll go ahead and set up everything aside from the arms and legs so that will be the spine the shoulder bones the neck bone and that's it actually okay let's try to set up the ik stuff exactly the same way as before i'll go to object mode select both of my armatures go to pause mode select the hand of the source rig focus on it grab my ik control and use the eyedropper to fill in this field tell autoric pro that this is ik select my poll target and again use the eyedropper to populate this field same on the other side and same for the feet this is my feed control i'll retarget to it for the foot set it as ik grab my pole and use the eyedropper same on the other side let's also set up the toes we have to retire it to the tall base basically anytime you see a bone that has the end suffix most of the time it is safe to ignore it and you can even delete it from a source armature but here i want to retarget the toes to the toe base so let's look for toe and find my toe dot l and right toe base dot r and i can see that i forgot to set up the shoulders and everything should be set up now again i'm not retargeting to the upper arm lower arm upper leg and lower leg in this rig in particular if i rotate this lower arm you'll see that it kind of changes the orientation of the elbow so if we did retarget to this while we are also attacking to the ik pole target then our targeted action will not be correct so in such cases it is especially important to skip retargeting to symbols and before we can retarget our target rig is in apos whereas the source armature is in tepos so let's go to redefine rest pose click ok and here because i haven't matched the upper arm and so on i cannot really use the copy selected bonus rotation feature but that's okay i'm simply going to rotate this the bones manually 30 degrees and minus 30 degrees on the other side and click apply and now i should be able to retarget let's try and there is our targeted motion to our completely custom ik rig so i'm finding retargeting to ik controls with auto rig pro to be a really good experience it's easy and it works really well so we covered almost all of the remap features of auto rig pro in the remaining minutes i want to give you an overview of some of the other features that the add-on has and you may find them useful from time to time below the source armature we have this in place option and this setting is useful for stuff like walk cycles and other actions where the character is moving forward in space so for example if i switch to the walk action here we have the character walking forward in space and if i enable the in place option the action will change and you'll see that it's called walk in place and now if i play the action the forward motion of the armature was removed and that's it it's a nice feature keep in mind it is kind of limited to walk cycles and other actions where the forward motion is constant and i found a little weirdness in the way it works for example if i disable the in place option here which by the way enables the walk the normal walk action which which moves forward in space but now if i switch to another action for example the sneaky walk and enable in place it will switch back to walk in place to the walking action which walks in place whereas i expected it to convert the sneaky walk to in place but if i go back to walk sneak disable in place and then enable it again then finally i'll have the walk sneak in place action okay then next to the retarget button we have this gears icon if i click on it it will show these additional options bind only and unbind only you may have seen them throughout the video when i accidentally clicked on this icon but bind only will constrain our target trick to the source rig and that will allow us to quickly preview the action that we have before we actually bake it with the retarget button so i'll click on it and here you can see that the source armature will play this action however um if we go to pause mode you'll see that there are no keyframes and there is a constraint on each bone and so my target armature is constrained to the source armature and that is meant for quick preview once you preview your action and and decided it looks good you should go to object mode and i would recommend that you click on bind only that will unbind both skeletons and then actually retarget and now we have your final action now i'm going to undo and there are a couple of additional retargeting options in here that we haven't talked about so let's select the fk rig go to pause mode select the foot and i'm going to use this button to focus on it and now even though this is a simple fk rig autoric pro has features to make this into a simple ik leg so i'm going to enable ik and skip the pole target and then enable ed ik constraint and let's do the same on the other side ik and add ik constraint and then try to retarget and you'll see that the action it was retargeted correctly but if i go to pause mode for this leg you'll see that there is an ik constraint on this leg and if i grab the foot i can tweak it as an ik leg and i can twist the thigh to orient the knee and that can be a nice way to get ik controls on an fk rig however if i disable the ik control you'll see that actually rotary pro disconnected this bone unparented this bone from the shin so we change the hierarchy of the rig so that is something to keep in mind if the hierarchy of the rig is something that is important to you then you may want to avoid this feature or you may want to create an intermediate rig as i showed you earlier with retarget helper there are many approaches that you can take in the autopole option i think it works only if you have actual pole targets enabled in here in this field and according to the manual if enabled the ik pole will move like it's parented to the ik target bone for example the foot bone and honestly i'm not sure what that means i wish the manual would say in what cases that is useful but who knows maybe it makes sense to you and you'll find it useful and finally there is the location option and again it's not an option that i have used personally but it is supposed to enable location retargeting um if we click on bind only and go to pose mode you'll see that all bones aside from the root the root has copy rotation and copy location on it but all other bones are constrained with copy rotation only now if i undo and let's select one of the bones for example this pine bone and enable location for it and and bind again and now you'll see that this phone also has copy location on it according to the manual this is useful for targeting facial animation which is something that i'm going to cover later in other videos so for now i don't have a very good example for using this location setting and finally let's take a look at the interactive tweaks these are relatively simple tools that allow you to tweak your targeted motion after the fact and they only work when the action is already baked so i'm going to unbind and retarget again now i have a baked retargeted motion and so i can expand the interactive tweaks and you'll see that this allows you to tweak the rotation and location of your retargeting and these features work very seamlessly and intuitively with the autoric pro humanoid rig but here i'm going to demonstrate on this rig and i think this will help you understand what actually happens when you use these options so the first very important thing to understand is what is being tweaked um you're tweaking the bone the target bone that is highlighted in this menu here so right now it is spine003 if i go to pause mode even though i know this i often just select the bone and try to use these options and i expect the selected bone to be a tweak but really it is the highlighted bone here but what you can do is select the bone that you want to tweak and click the double arrows here and that will highlight the bone and now you can tweak it in here now let's switch this window to graph editor and that will help us understand what the tweaks actually do so now i'm going to want to tweak the rotation of this arm um so let's hide all location and scale curves and i'm going to zoom in on my rotation curves and you'll see that they are in quaternion mode which is the default mode of all bones in blender and now let's try to tweak the x rotation of this bone and you'll see that actually the w quaternion curve is being moved so when you click one of these buttons what it does is it just moves one of these curves up and down the whole curve so it is kind of the same as selecting it in moving it but using this interface may be a little bit more intuitive and so back to the rotations all of the bones of this rig are actually in quaternion mode here's you'll see it under item rotation is set to quaternion and the autoric pro tweaks work only with oilers so what you can do here is select all your bones and go to pose convert rotation modes and if you don't have this feature that means that you don't have rigidify enabled for some reason even though this is not a rigified feature it is packaged with riggify so enable reify if you want it and here i'm going to want to affect all bones and only the current action and i want to convert to xyz euler and just press ok and now if i look at my arm you'll see that it is now converted to xyz euler now if i press the plus x or minus x button you'll see that only the x euler curve is being affected and so this allows me to tweak my retargeted motion for example here i change the rotation of the arm and that will stay throughout the whole action and these tweaks can be very useful when working with an ik rig often the height of the hips may not look quite right after retargeting so i can select my hips here focus on it with this button and now i want to move it up and down in space so let's see which axis that is not the z axis yes the y-axis so i'm going to move it on minus y a little bit and that was too much let's undo and let's make this tweak value to 0.01 or so and so i need to bring the the hips forward a little bit as well something like this and that allowed me to easily tweak the height of the hips something cool about these interactive tweaks is that it kind of remembers the original settings the original values so if i press this x button the original height of the hips will be reset before we wrap things up i have this example with this dinosaur and you may have seen this in the rococo video already but i think it's an important point that i want to make and that is that we can retarget to characters that are not necessarily humanoid whereas a source armature is generally quite humanoid and so to save some time i have already matched the bones i think we did the matching process quite a lot so it should be second nature to you by now and now i'll auto scale which i've already done and now something very important is the wrist position of these rigs the source rig is obviously in t-pose whereas a dinosaur has a completely different pose so let's try to redefine the rest pose i'll start from the rest pose press ok and now just to see what happens i'm going to select all bones and copy selected bones rotations and you'll see that my source armature assume this pose of the dinosaur and let's apply and see what happens if we did retarget this action which is a walk cycle retarget okay and you'll see that my dinosaur is kind of walking upright a bit like a human and that's interesting but it's definitely not what we want so let's undo and i'll undo before i apply this new rest pose so let's cancel this now and try to refine the rest pose again and this time i'll just select the arms and click copy selected bone rotations apply retarget and now i get something that is much closer to what i imagined which is the dinosaur keeping its natural pose but still appearing to walk it's floating a bit above the ground but i guess i could use the interactive tweaks to fix that i'll push the location a little bit down on the z-axis and now the dinosaur is walking on the ground i hope you enjoyed this video about the retargeting features of auto rig pro and if you don't already have auto rig pro i hope it also helped you decide whether auto rig pro is worth it for you if you're interested in the topic of retargeting i'll keep making videos about that i'll keep covering more retargeting tools and later in the series we'll also talk about cleaning up tweaking and combining retargeted motions big thanks to my supporters please click like subscribe and hope to see you in the next video

Channel: CGDive

Views: 3,776

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: HHnt-3uLSUo

Length: 71min 13sec (4273 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021