Would it be possible to incorporate rigging support for characters with no legs/just tails?

[Jasper29]

Hey Thomas, I was just wondering if it is at all possible to have support (at least through Rigify, don’t know how difficult it would be

for MHX), for characters that have tail geografts? I’ve tried to do it completely through Diffeo a while back, but could never get it to

work. If I easy import without geografts merged the legs and their bones are still present in Blender even if

they are hidden in the viewport in DAZ. I have deleted the leg bones after setting up metarig and even either masked or deleted

most of the legs before, but it always throws an error when setting up the final rig.

If I easy import with geografts merged, the legs finally disappear but the leg bones are left behind still. Then after deleting them, the

error still occurs.

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Here I am using the snakeman character from RawArt: Nagalean for Genesis 9 | Daz 3D with the tail geograft. I used

easy import with geografts merged, so the leg meshes are gone, but the leg bones were present. I deleted the leg bones as

stated above, and instead used a basic tail sample from the Rigify panel in Edit mode. I parented the tail bone to the pelvis and

then tried to generate the final rig:

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and this is the error that occurs when deleting the DAZ rig legs before metarig generation:

Rigify can normally generate a rig with no legs without a problem, so I was wondering if it its possible to do with the Genesis

characters, unless there is either a limitation of the addon, or I’m doing something wrong?

[Thomas Larsson]

Unfortunately, I have a very superficial knowledge of Rigify. The plugin merely lets Rigify create a human metarig and modifies the bone locations before rigification. In that way the plugin doesn’t need to know about the internal structure of the metarig (custom properties etc), but it also means that it only works for human characters.

The character even has to have five fingers, although a single toe is fine. MHX generation crashes if you remove a finger (note to self: fix that). Rigify sort of works if you remove fingers, because the metarig still has the finger parented to the hand, even if the location is off. Here is the Rigify rest pose if the pinky was removed from the original rig:

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[Jasper29]

Understood-- I work with Rigify a lot, but I don’t know much about it on the programming side (just an animator). I did however find a manual

solution by generating the metarig, moving the leg+IK foot controllers outside of the mesh, setting up a Rigify tail sample, make new vertex

groups in relation to the new tail bones (e.g: DEF-tail.001), generate the final rig, then delete the custom reference tail vertex groups (e.g: tail_01)

so the mesh follows the IK tail controllers:

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The only catch is that the IK leg controllers still generate (they are obviously useless and don’t work), but they can easily be hidden.

[Thomas Larsson]

Good if you can handle this yourself. I'm closing this because would require a major change how rigification is done, if it can be done at all.

[Jasper29]

Ok, no problem. I appreciate you even taking a look at it. Thank you.