Auto-Rig Pro 3.46 release, 2019 retrospective

Artell writes:

Hi, I'm Artell, the developer of the Auto-Rig Pro add-on.

This rigging add-on was born in 2015 on the Blender Market, and it has been in continuous development since then. This last year was particularly exciting! A great amount of energy was put into it, thanks to the very positive support from users.

Auto-Rig Pro 3.46

First of all, a new version has just been released to celebrate this new year:

Adding corrective shape keys for IK bones chains was a pain, no more: there's now a tool to create them easily, and adjust the rotation value when the shape key must starts/end.

By popular demand, arms and legs animations can now be baked for a specified frame range to FK or IK.

2019 Retrospective

There were hundred of changes, all of them couldn't be listed here, so below is a digest to sum up 2019 work:

• Blender 2.8 update. It's no secret that Blender 2.80 was released this summer as a revolutionary Blender release. Updating the addon to Blender 2.8 was an important part of the deal. The changes in the python API lead to redesign and refactor a large part the code logic. The user interface of the addon has also been redesigned, to feel more compact, convenient and efficient on the user side. All changes related to the Blender 2.8 release can be found here.
• Feathers: It's now possible to rig wings using to the new dedicated feathers options of the arm limbs.

• Multiple twist bones, and twist bones as secondary controllers: A game changer when exporting to game engines that don't support dual quaternion skinning. 1 twist bone above, 4 twist bones below in Unreal Engine. Notice how it completely solves the candy paper wrap issue with important wrist rotations. More information here,

• Skinning: Approximate voxelization for better automatic skinning.
• Apply pose as rest pose: The current pose can now be applied as rest pose (kind of “Match to Rig” inverted!). Under the hood, the armature modifiers of meshes are applied then restored, the reference bones position are changed, then clicking “Match to Rig” completes the operation.

 

• Soft Lips: The lips now behave in a more natural way. When moving the lips corner or jaw controller, the other lips controllers will follow softly.
• Game Engine Export: The shape keys animation export has been finally fixed, to make it work properly with multiple actions when exporting.

 

Roadmap

It's not over! Here is a list of ideas for the next versions.

Happy new year, and more importantly, happy blending :)