start rigify in ik mode and warn about prebending

[Alessandro Padovani]

This is really to help newbies since I get the same questions again and again at the daz forum. Having rigify in fk mode is confusing because most tutorials assume it is in ik mode. Also we know that rigify needs “optimize pose for ik” for ik to work fine, but again this is not obvious, so a warning when converting to rigify may help a lot.

Then, if I understand correctly, if we “pose for ik” the daz poses will no more be imported correctly and this is another issue to warn the user about.

[Alessandro Padovani]

So basically we have two options.

1. Use rigify with “optimize pose for ik”. This will be good for original animation but not to import daz poses and animations.
2. Use mhx without “optimize pose for ik”. Because mhx doesn’t need prebending, or at least in my tests it works fine with the default daz pose. This will be good both for original animation and to import daz poses and animations.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

May be we can add the “optimize pose for ik” option directly in the rigify panel, since this is strictly related.

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[Thomas Larsson]

I didn’t deliberately set the rigify limbs to fk, but somehow it happened anyway. Now the limbs are set to ik as the last step in the creation.

There is a warning in the tooltip for the optimize tool. Not only does it corrupt poses, but jcms will be off too. Adding it as an option to the rigify button could be useful.

The reason why the mhx bones bend correctly is that there ik forearms and shins have limit rotation constraints (“hints”) above the ik constraint. This is a trick that I learned from the guy who made the original rigify rig, but apparently it was removed in later versions.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Commit 54d5c9d works fine.

As a minor note we may want to turn off tweak bones too since they are advanced and complicate the ik rig. The default options should be the easiest possible for newbies, then advanced users will know their way. edit. Or we may add options to the rigify panel the same as mhx.

Please let me know if you agree so I can close this.

As for prebending unfortunately it is needed for ik to work. That is, rigify without prebending is unusable. So it doesn’t make sense to use rigify without “pose for ik“ and the side effects are unavoidable. This means rigify is not so good for daz figures, I tested from G1 to G8.1 and it’s the same, the daz rest pose doesn’t work.

Then Thomas if you can find a way to apply the rotation constraints to rigify too, so it can work as mhx, it would be a major improvement to use rigify with daz figures. And also we wouldn’t need the “pose for ik” option anymore.

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[Thomas Larsson]

An optimize option (default on) has been added to the rigify options. Also, only the main pose layers are visible, although that task should really have fallen on the rigify plugin.

Messing with the internal structure of rigify is not something that I want to do. Both because I don’t understand it, and because there are many versions of rigify. Even if I could add a constraint that works with rigify for Blender 2.92, who knows what happens a few Blender releases down the road. The current version does not even work with legacy rigify for B2.92, because the basic.pivot module isn’t found.

Another reason why I don’t want to spend too much time on rigify is that I don’t use it myself. The main reason why I started this project is that I wanted to bring daz characters into Blender so I could use them myself, and rigify isn’t part of that.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Commit 4903c1d works fine.

I understand your reasons for rigify. Or course it would be another thing to be maintained with blender and rigify versions. Anyway with “pose for ik” rigify works fine enough for original blender animation, and most daz poses work fine with minor adjustements.

So if you don’t feel like “messing” with rigify it’s fine to just have the known limitations in the docs. And there’s always mhx that works perfect. Personally I hope you may keep a note in your mind to mess with rigify though, I trust you can.

Marking as resolved.