Hey there!
I’ve been playing around with the Pipeline in Blender for a while now, and honestly—it’s brilliant. Especially the facial controls that instantly blend in the wrinkles. Solid 10/10.
I’m just wondering, are there any plans to add an option to generate a skeleton that’s ready for Auto-Rig Pro in the future? Like it or not, Rigify tends to be a bit moody. Technically, I can use the quick rig now to generate a skeleton, but then I’m stuck with a ton of work transferring the facial controls, reassigning drivers, and tweaking materials to get everything working properly.
The issue here is that the current pipeline tool
is leveraging the rigify system that is essentially embedded in every build of blender
and thus open source under the GPL license.
Auto rig pro is a third party addon that may limit complete access to its core code.
I agree with your opinion that an ARP body rig with a CC4 head with all of the facial animation option would be cool.
as you could still use actor core motions and other mocap via the ARP retarget tool
As this can be done with a Daz Genesis figures exported to Blender via the FREE diffeomorphic addon enabling me to have the ARP body rig but
keep my ability to import facial animation from Daz studio.
Overall, Diffeomorphic is an amazing tool, but in the end, it still defaults to either a Rigify or MHX rig. You can hook it up with QuickRig or manually re-rig it to ARP, but then you lose all the drivers tied to the shapekeys, and manually reconnecting everything is a nightmare.
CC, on the other hand, has a much more optimized rig. It’s solid enough that you can transfer the whole skeleton straight into ARP and just use it—but yeah, the facial controls are the catch.
Honestly, the best solution I could think of would be to add an option in the pipeline to generate facial controls separately. Something like “select a skeleton and the bone to attach the facial rig to,” and that’s it. It would generate the same facial rig as now, just parented directly to any custom rig—be it your own, CC’s, or ARP’s.
Doesn’t seem too far-fetched to implement either, to be honest.
Not quite ,
A Daz genesis figure ,imported via diffeo, comes in with the Default Daz Deform body and face rig, you have to manually choose to convert to MHX or Rigify.
Once you transfer those Daz facial viseme/expression morphs to Blender shape keys with one button, you can replace all of the daz rigging with an ARP rig and retain ALL of the Daz facial viseme/expression shape keys and still import facial animation from any of the various Daz facial animation systems such as Mimic, Anilip or the Iphone ARKit based facemojo plugin for Daz studio.
And you still have access to all of the actorcore motions (via the ARP retargetter),
at a fraction of the cost of completely buying into the Reallusion ecosystem.
Daz studio is FREE so even if you buy the most expensive audio based facial animation system for Daz studio combined with the $50 cost of ARP
that about $150 total.
Nowhere near the cost of buying Iclone/CC4 just to get decent looking animated talking characters into Blender.
Hi… Please remember to post any feature requests in the Feedback Tracker. The tracker is monitored by the dev team and is the best way to get new features considered. Thanks.
A quick tutorial on using the FREE Accurig tool from Reallusion
to create basic deform rigs for fast, easy one click conversion to an ARP control rig, with Auto Rig Pro’s amazing “Quick Rig” Addon for Blender.
After importing a DAZ model, I can bring in all the facial expressions from DAZ and control them in runtime. They’re driven by drivers directly connected to the shapekeys. But every time I hook the model up to ARP—whether manually or with QuickRig—I lose all morph control from the Runtime panel. I’ve never been able to bypass that or find a way to comfortably use ARP with DAZ without manually rebuilding the entire facial driver system from scratch.
I don’t see the “Transfer Shapekey” function you showed in your screenshot. From what I’ve researched, it mainly lets you transfer shapekeys between meshes. I could be wrong or missing something, so if that’s the case, please correct me.
As for costs, I won’t argue. Reallusion’s stuff is very expensive, and I honestly don’t understand why the prices are so high. Maybe the core software is worth it, fine—but the prices for character assets are just insane.
It does work you have to follow the steps exactly I just did a test with a Daz G8 male.
Imported him via Diffeomorphic
loaded his Daz visemes via Diffeomorphic.
Converted his visemes to Blender shape keys.(under Advanced drop down/morphs)
Load at least ONE Daz facial animation
from Daz studio(via Diffeo) with his RIG selected in the blender outliner.
Transfer that animation from his rig to his mesh shape keys as shown in the video.
Now switch over to Auto rig pro and
replace the Daz rig with an ARP rig
(Manually or via the G8 preset with the ARP quick rig extension)
From here on you, can load and replace unlimited Daz mimic facial animations to his/her mesh shape keys via the Diffeo “import action” button because Diffeo only needs Daz shape keys and any type of rig.
Note it is better to have & use the ARP quick rig extension ($12)
because it converts the Daz FACE rig to an ARP face rig.
there will be some orphaned bones created but just sort them out in pose mode and hide them,and you will have a face that you can manipulate via the APR face rig
and ALSO continue to use Diffeo to load base layer lipsinc from any of the Daz sources like 32 bit mimic.
etc.
