A Complex 3D Rig Made For a Stylized Character in Blender

Featuring IK-FK controls, rubber limbs, parent driver switches, and more.

Take a look at this intricate full-body rig created by a 3D Modeling Artist known as Framed51 for Cooper, an original stylized 3D character model. Enabling the artist to pose the character's body and tweak facial expressions, this complex rig features IK-FK controls, rubber limbs, parent driver switches, foot roll mechanics, deformation-driven face controls with tweak controls and a shrink wrap cage, head tracking, and more. According to Framed51, this custom setup functions as intended and represents the artist's most advanced work in Blender to date.

For comparison, here's how the rig looked last year:

Besides showcasing the rig itself, the author also shared a thorough explanation of how the character's head was set up over on Reddit:

"So, there are two models of the head, one with the mouth and one without a mouth. The mouth one is being shrink-wrapped to the other model with a vertex group to make sure the inner mouth bag doesn't get affected by the modifier happening after the armature and corrective smooth modifiers.

The facial control bones are also shrink-wrapped to the no-mouth model. Now when weighting the head models, I had to create duplicate face deformation bones for the two head models, one that's actually going to create the expressions, and the other just for easy weighting for the no-mouth head. you can toggle the deform property of the bones and correctly auto-weight both heads without the 'deform bones' weighting to the shrink wrap cage or the 'Shrink wrap bones' weighting to the mouth head."

On top of that, the author recommended a couple of YouTube channels, Dikko and DanPro, for those who would like to learn more about rigging in Blender:

And here are some of Framed51's earlier projects, you can check out more by visiting the author's Twitter and Instagram pages: 

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