bRigNet

Neural Rigging for blender using RigNet

Blender is the open source 3D application from the Blender Foundation. RigNet has been presented in the following papers

  @InProceedings{AnimSkelVolNet,
    title={Predicting Animation Skeletons for 3D Articulated Models via Volumetric Nets},
    author={Zhan Xu and Yang Zhou and Evangelos Kalogerakis and Karan Singh},
    booktitle={2019 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV)},
    year={2019}
  }

  @article{RigNet,
    title={RigNet: Neural Rigging for Articulated Characters},
    author={Zhan Xu and Yang Zhou and Evangelos Kalogerakis and Chris Landreth and Karan Singh},
    journal={ACM Trans. on Graphics},
    year={2020},
    volume={39}
  }

Warning: this addon is experimental, the install procedure is clumsy and the code could be better. Everything about it could change, hopefully in good.

Setup

Follow RigNet instruction and create a Python environment with all required packages

For compatibility reasons, Pillow must be installed in blender. You can install pip following this guide, then

[BLENDER_DIR]\[BLENDER_VER]\python\bin\python -m pip install --upgrade Pillow

Installation

Download bRigNet as a .zip file and install it from the blender addons window, or copy the code to the blender scripts path

Usage

Enable bRigNet in the blender addons, the preferences will show up. Set the Modules path properties to the RigNet environment from the previous step

RigNet requires a trained model. They have made theirs available at this address The checkpoint folder can be copied to the RigNet subfolder. A different location can be set in the addon preferences.

Rig Generation

the bRigNet tab will show up in the Viewport tools. Select a character mesh as target. Please make sure it doesn't exceed the 5K triangles. You can use the Decimator modifier to reduce the polycount on a copy of the mesh, and select a Collection of high res model on which to transfer the final weights

Load generated rigs

Rigs generated using RigNet from the command line can be loaded via the Load Skeleton panel. Please select the *.obj and *.txt file and press the button Load Rignet character

License

bRigNet is released under the GNU General Public License version 3. RigNet is licensed under the General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3), or under a Commercial License.