Updates Log

3.72

What’s new and improved

Version:

• Blender 4.2 Extension compatibility

Rig:

• Facial: New “Use Translation to Rotate Jaw” toggle in Limb Options, to rotate the jaw instead of translating by default

• Custom Shapes: New “Apply Transforms” to apply/zero-out the per-bone custom shapes extra transforms (loc, rot, scale)

• Warning, spine breaking update. Cleared inconsistencies in the spine bones hierarchy and deform settings, regarding _bend and _base spine bones with Secondary Controllers set to “Twist”. It is now fixed but can alter existing animations and skinning. This change was unfortunately required to fix inconsistencies and further develop the spine rig.

• Spine _bend controllers are now white by default

• New Reversed spine setting in the spine Limb Options. Reversed spine is useful to rotate the spine hierarchy from the chest, instead of the pelvis.

• New “Align Bend Controllers” parameter in the spine Limb Options. Useful to manually tweak the c_spine_bend controllers after Match to Rig, in Edit Mode

• UI: Arm and Leg Limb Options have now tabs at the top of the menu, for clarity

• Fingers: Independent Pinky finger in Limb Options, so that the pinky metacarpal can be rotated without dragging other fingers (pinky auto)

• Fingers: Revised the pinky auto feature, so that the constraint influence is properly spread among fingers, if middle or ring fingers are missing

• Fingers: IK Poles are now parented to the IK target by default (“Tip Ctrl”)

• Toes: New IK parent and shape settings in Limb Options, similar to fingers

• UI: Spline IK Limb Options now have tabs (Main, Relations…)

• Spline IK: The scale space of masters controllers is now an option, can either inherit the main stretch bone scale, or c_spline_root scale

Skin:

• A warning message is displayed if mesh objects have non-zeroed out Delta Transforms values.

• New “Update Vertex Groups” setting in Limb Options of spine, arm and leg limbs. This avoids the tedious re-binding phase when changing only Secondary Controllers

Addon:

• Changed the addon category from “Animation” to “Rigging”

• Preferences are now saved to an external file when clicking the “Save Preferences” button in the addon preferences. Then they are automatically restored when installing a new version of the addon.

Remap:

• New “Only Containing” text box when remapping multiple animations, to filter actions containing only the given keywords

• UI: Moved Location button next to “Set as Root”, and hide IK settings when not enabled

• Copy Frame Range and Cyclic settings from the source action to the remapped action

• New Import and Export functions in the multiple actions menu

• Multiple Anims: Moved Import and Export buttons at the top, and removed OK and Cancel buttons that were useless here, avoiding to scroll down in case of numerous actions

• Multiple Anims: Remapped actions are no more remappable by default

Rig Tools:

• Rig Layers: Bones part of the current set can now be displayed in the interface by clicking the eye icon button

• Make sure to keyframe even locked axes of forearm FK and leg FK bones when baking

• Spline IK-FK Baking support

• Optimized IK-FK arm baking performance, the loop was erroneously iterating more than necessary over the arm bones

• New “Time” button in the bake menus, to set global current action frame range

• Spline IK-FK snapping has been improved with an algorithm that refines iteratively the IK to FK chain snap. More settings to fine-tune the snap function. Warning, snapping while stretching the Spline is still not properly supported due to the complexity of the Spline IK behavior and rig

• IK-FK snap operator now supports all selected bones

Export:

• The “Only Containing” setting was replaced with a single search box to simplify, and the eye icon to show exportable actions was removed, since it was not relevant

• A Spline IK limb replacing a Spine limb is now supported in Humanoid export. The root/pelvis spine bone is still required though, the Spline IK should be parented to it.

Smart:

• Ears can now be disabled from facial markers

Fixed

Addon:

• Check for Update: compatibility issues with 4.2

• Check for Update: could not get the correct addon version

Export:

• FBX: compatibility issue with 4.2

• Saving presets returns an error when an action is not found in the Action List

• Spline IK curves visible after exporting

• Spine bones exporting incorrectly since latest changes

• Spine bones exporting incorrect skinning since latest changes

• Quick Rig Preserve skeleton were not properly supported when exporting multiple actions

• Error when no active actions were found, while still trying to bake because of a Quick Rig Preserve skeleton

• Quick Rig Preserve skeleton scale issue, when the skeleton had keyframed non zero-out scale values

• Solidify thickness was incorrectly scaled when enabling Units x100

Rig:

• Error “key eyelid_amounts not found” when Match to Rig, when setting up the facial rig only with Smart

• Error in restore_pose() when restoring the custom property value of Group ID Properties

• Error when setting one eyelid bone

• Error with older rigs/presets having no “eyelids_amount” property

• The new spine count setting per limb was missing limits (1-64)

• Error when disabling facial via the “Disable” button instead of Limb Options

• Error when applying the rest pose, while some skinned meshes are not in current view layer

• The Color Theme was missing some bones that were not belonging to the color collections

• Duplicating or mirroring limbs was not duplicating the related drivers

• 3 Bones Leg parent not set correctly

Rig Tools:

• Error when baking IK-FK leg

Mac:

• Error when loading custom icons under certain circumstances. Skip custom icons if they cannot be loaded.

Remap:

• Error with Clean FK Rotations

• Incorrect frame range printed in the Blender console when remapping multiple animations

Smart:

• Error when ears are disabled, and ears markers are out of the mesh surface

3.71

What’s new and improved

Rig:

• New 3 Bones Leg Type 2 setting (old default one is Type 1). This is a complete revised version of the 3 bones leg, with an IK rotation controller at the calf joint, and extra stretch controller for the upper thigh.

• “_bend” secondary controllers are now white color by default

• “Set Character Name” now also renames the cs_grp empty object

• Edit Ref Bones/Match to Rig now preserve the visibility of user-added collections

• Multiple Spine limbs are now supported

• Kilt limbs support in “Apply Pose as Rest Pose”

• Facial: New “Linear Y” and “Linear Z” settings in Limb Options, to better define for each axis the shape of the lips when moving the corner controller (was a single value driving all axes before). Plus, to fine-tweak the result, individual custom properties located on the lips reference bones can be adjusted: “linear_Y” and “linear_Z”.

• Facial: The “Linear (Corners)” and “Linear (Jaw)” parameters in Limb Options now support negative values, allowing even more curved interpolation

• Facial: New “Soft” setting for eyebrows. This allows to deform smoothly the eybrows when moving the c_eyebrow_full “controller”.

• Facial: New “Masters” setting for eyebrows. This adds 2 master controllers at the root and tip of the eyebrow, to adjust the global shape of the eyebrow quickly

• UI: Since the facial Limb Options panel was getting over-populated, it has been redesigned with tabs to display Eyes, Mouth, and Others settings only.

• New “IK Pole Height” setting for 3 Bones Legs. Setting it to 0.0 allows backward-compat. with older versions

• Facial: New eyelid masters in option (Limb options). Useful to tweak numerous eyelid bones at once. Complies with the Blink Pose and export tools.

Skin:

• Shape Keys can now be evaluated in their current state when binding

Remap:

• New Heat preset

Export:

• New actions are now exportable by default

• “Custom Export Scripts” can now be embedded in the Blender file (text editor)

• Vertex Colors: New “Prioritze Active Color” setting

• New “Ignore Linked Actions” setting to prevent linked actions from exporting

• When shape keys cannot be baked because of a modifier altering the vertex count, a message now reports it after exporting

Preferences:

• The default paths of custom Armatures, Limbs, Rig Layers… are now set to User/Documents/AutoRigPro

Picker:

• Major speed improvement when selecting a picker bone. There was overhead in the bone selection/ armature collection management, it has been refactored. Selecting a bone from the picker is now almost instant, while it could take up to one second before.

• Multiple eyelid bones and eyelid masters are now supported in the picker panel

• Multiple lip bones and lip masters are now supported in the picker panel

Fixed

Rig:

• “Apply Pose as Rest Pose” was missing support for Bendy-Bones limbs

• Missing toes activation in Limb Options when adding a leg limb

• Missing constraints removal when unsetting “Spine Master Controller”

• Error when disabling eyebrows

• Facial: Error with soft-lips “Visual Only”

• 3 Bones Leg Type 2 returning layer error in Blender pre 4x versions

Rig Tools:

• Invalid 3 Bones Leg Type 1 FK to IK baking

• Invalid 3 Bones Leg Type 1 IK to FK baking

Smart:

• Error when a 2-spine bones armature was already existing in the scene

Export:

• The spine bones amount was not evaluated properly when exporting as a humanoid, since the spine limb is now a duplicable limb

• UE: The “joints fans” were preventing to export a valid hierarchy when enabling Mannequin Axes

• Error when exporting spine limbs in Universal mode

• The dummy mesh could not export anymore, the view_layer update needed to be triggered manually

• Linked actions were localized accidentally in the file

• Spine bone error when exporting as a Humanoid, and missing spine animation/constraints when exporting as Universal

• “Prioritze Active Color” were not compatible with Blender versions pre 4.1

Skin:

• Smooth Twist Weights was not working with pre-3.6 Blender versions

3.70

What’s new and improved

Version:

• 4.1: Armature collections API updated

• 4.1: Since message box operators now include a “Cancel” button, use the direct popup message function instead, when “OK”/”Cancel” button are superfluous

• 4.1: Ported the whole ARP FBX exporter to the latest Blender’s FBX exporter, since mesh normals are exported with new settings in 4.1. To maintain backward-compatibility, the old version of the ARP FBX exporter is run on older Blender versions

• 4.1: Added an “internal” collection, as parent of the mch_ internal collections and body color groups. Collections are sorted when Match to Rig.

Interface:

• New help buttons that link to the documentation in the rig, smart, remap, export menus. Can be disabled from the addon preferences.

Rig:

• Spline IK: New Twist target setting in option. Useful when rigging long necks with Spline IK limbs. A target bone must be defined to evaluate the twist rotation from.

• Spline IK: New “Parent External Bone” setting, in order to define what bone an external limb must be parented to: the deforming tip bone, or the control tip bone. For example, if the neck ref bone is parented to the tip ref bone of the Spline IK limb, it is recommended to set it to “Tip Deform” for a correct behavior, so that the neck bone remains attached to the actual deforming spline bone.

• Facial: New “Unlock Jaw Y Loc” setting, to allow jaw translation along the Y axis

• The Import and Export features can now handle Limb Options. Useful when needing to backup rig data.

• New mirror feature for the “Add Hand Fist” tool

• New mirror feature for the “Add Blink Pose” tool

Rig Tools:

• Head Lock now supports Bake

• Arm Lock now supports Snap and Bake

• Thigh Lock now supports Snap and Bake

• Pole Parent now supports Bake

• Default frame start/end of bake operators are now set to the scene or preview range

• (Performance) The bake operators do not work with Auto-Key anymore. It is now turned off internally for performance reasons, such as the Motion Paths evaluation

Skin:

• The “Smooth Twist Weights” setting now supports multiple twist bones, was limited to 1 twist bone before

Remap:

• New Mocopi preset

Export:

• Renaming bones from file now supports Blender’s internal text files too (thanks to Greisane for the patch)

• GLTF: Custom properties located on actions and pose bones are now exported

• FBX: Custom properties located on pose bones are now exported

• Preserve hierarchy when objects deformed by armature modifiers are parented to other deformed objects

• UI: Removed Auto-Rig Pro specific params from the UI when exporting a custom armature (twist export, c_traj export…)

Smart:

• The elbow position is now set more accurately, supporting non-straight arms

• New settings to define the spine curvature: “Straight” for straight spine, “Model Fit” to fit the actual model shape, “Arched (UE)” to fit the UE5 Mannequin spine.

• When setting the spine count higher than 3, the spine curvature is now maintained in “Model Fit” and “Arched” mode. Spine bones were always straight before.

• New settings to define the clavicles alignment, to better fit the UE Mannequin.

• UI: Collapsable menus (Blender 4.1+ only)

Fixed

Rig Tools:

• API: The operator arp.convert_rot_mode() had wrong default values

• Motion Trails evaluation + Animated Rig Layers was failing to update. A picky condition has been added to update the collection visibility only when necessary

Rig:

• Rig: “Show IK Directions” was not drawing the line when selecting only the head or tail of a bone

Export:

• FBX: Error with the new “argument mesh_names_data” when using Blender 4.0

• Incorrect mannequin bones axes in some cases

• Error when exporting linked actions in Blende 4.1

• GLTF: Missing arm and leg bones when exporting as a humanoid with Twist Secondaries

• custom_collection type error in sort_armature_collections()

• Invalid mesh data export when Triangulate was enabled, due to mesh renaming issues

• Exclude objects from export, that are located in external view layers, since these are unaccessible data.

• Animated shape keys not exporting to GLTF with linked rigs

• Animated shape keys not exporting to GLTF with non-linked rigs. Fixing previous commit.

Remap:

• Incorrect retargetting if arms or legs bones were set with the “Lock-Free” option

Rig:

• Re-initialized bones color groups from armature presets, as a workaround for the invisible stick bones

• Limb Export: Pose bone properties were not exported for all bones

• Sorting alphabetically the internal collections under Blender 4.1+ was leading to error in case custom collections were added by users

• “Apply Pose as Rest Pose” was missing support for Spline IK limbs

• Bones collection displayed as “exclusive” (Blender 4.1+, star icon) was interfering when cliking Edit Reference Bones, or other buttons. Exclusive display is now disabled automatically

• The Mirror Blink Pose function was missing the eyelid tweak controller

Smart:

• Visibility states of hidden objects was not restored properly after the detection

3.69

What’s new and improved

Version:

• Upgraded the whole code base to Blender 4.0, with armature collections support. Make sure to click “Update Armature” when opening rigs from older versions

• Because Blender 4 removed the extra frame added at the end of actions frame range, added a new Legacy setting to back up this additional frame

• Blender 4 does not handle properly the double IK fingers constraints, leads to cyclic dependency (wobbly bones effect). Then, unfortunately the second IK at the tip of the fingers had to be removed. Click “Update Armature” when opening old rigs with IK fingers. Note, this second IK constraint could be restored later, will require more advanced bones mechanics to avoid the cyclic dependency.

Interface:

• New “?” button in the Limb Option panel, that opens the documentation page (internet) of the selected limb when clicked.

• Renamed the UI panel “Bone Custom Props” to “Bone Properties”

Export:

• New Presets feature, to save and load export settings quickly

• FBX: Expose the “Force Start/End Keyframe”

• Clean up of the humanoid UE skeleton collections

• The Fbx and Gltf export operators were renamed, leading to change the script snippets in the documentation. Old name: “id.arp_export_fbx_panel”, New: “arp.arp_export_fbx_panel”

• FBX: Exposed the Vertex Color space setting

• Mesh to mesh parenting is now preserved when exporting, and non-skinned children meshes parented to skinned meshes are exported as well

• Bones animations can now be exported with constant keyframe interpolation, using the “Set Const. Bones” button. Applies to all keyframes, all actions of given bones. Todo later: fine-tuning, in order to export only specific keyframes as constant.

• Added effective export time in the popup notification after export

• Humanoid export now supports more than 2 arms and feathers

• Menu to remove export presets (X button next to +)

Rig:

• The selected armature can now be saved as a custom preset automatically (it was already possible to add custom presets before, but the preset files had to created and put in the folder manually)

• The custom presets armatures can be removed using a dedicated menu

• Facial options: Slight change in the behavior of “Update Transforms” for eyelids. Now, eyelid bones are aligned automatically in a circular shape only if the amount was changed and this setting is turned on. Before, they were always aligned if the amount was changed, regardless of this setting.

• Spline IK: New FK mode (Limb Options). Generate master FK controllers every Nth bones, by default locked to the IK masters amount for correct IK-FK snap.

• Spline IK: IK-FK switch and snap (Rig Main Properties). IK to FK snapping is accurate, but FK to IK is not by nature: compensating the smooth curve interpolation between control points is quite a technical challenge, to improve later if possible.

• Spline IK: New “Update Vertex Groups Name” setting (Limb Options). If enabled, automatically renames the vertex groups of the deformed meshes, according to the latest changes in Spline IK Limb Options.

• Armature Presets: Custom armature presets can now be stored in an external folder, as set in the addon preferences. Armature libraries can be added into this external folder, making it independent from the addon installation folder (custom armatures will not be deleted anymore when updating the addon). Custom presets files stored in the addon folder still remain.

• Blink Pose: When removing the blink pose, a menu now prompts to remove the whole blink pose, or only in-between poses

• New “Joints Fans” bones, for optimal volume preservation of elbows, wrists and thigh and knees. Useful when exporting, if skinning’s Preserve Volume is disabled. From 0 to 32 bones can be set in Limb Options.

• The “Reset All Pose” button is now displayed even if no bones are selected

• New Toes Metatarsal bones (Limb Options), can be parented to foot instead of the main toe bone.

• New Toes IK-FK (Limb Options). IK-FK switch and snap, IK Direction inversion, for all or selected fingers. Automatic renaming of vertex groups when enabling/disabling IK-FK bones in Limb Options.

• New IK hand offset controller (Limb Options)

Fixed

Export:

• Error when actions contained a single frame only

• Scene Units set to None was crashing the export

• Actions with no “id_root” attributes were not exported

• Wrong mannequin bones axes orientation, because of hidden bones collections

• Shape keys animation as an NLA track did not export with “Apply Modifiers” setting enabled

• Error when exporting IK Splines with Blender 4

• Crash when no deforming bones are selected, while “Only Selected Bones” is enabled

• The “Set Universal Rig” function was missing custom script execution

• The Set/Unset export rig function could remove vertex groups when unsetting, if the vertex groups were not assigned to any vertices

• “Export Root Bone (c_traj)” was not working in Universal type

• Fbx export crashing when exporting UVs with non zeroed out mapping rotation

• Metacarpal finger bones were always exported even if “Selected Bones Only” was enabled

• Error when exporting a custom armature with a bone named “root.x”

Remap:

• Fixed unreported bug with collection visibility

Version:

• “Show IK Direction” line broken in Blender 4

• “Update Armature” was not removing the second IK fingers constraint when the rig was already updated to Blender 4

• Move constraints operator broken in Blender 4, use lower level functions instead

• Some users report error when importing the Requests module (chardet import error), use urllib instead

Rig:

• Ensure bones custom shapes are assigned to the cs collection and parented to cs_grp

• Layers: Error (in console) when updating layers visibility while nothing is selected

• Disable fingers Rot From Scale broken in Blender 4

• Control and reference lips bones had incorrect colors in Edit mode

• Error with Kilt limbs and single colliding leg

• The Kilt custom shapes were removed when editing more than one Kilt limb

• New eyelid bones had no color

• Legs IK poles roll was not aligned when Match to Rig. Added a Legacy setting for backward-compatibility

• In Secondary Controller:Twist mode, the forearm twist bone was missing an offset bone, leading to scale the transforms.

• Edit Shape: Editing the bone custom shape now supports the additional transforms settings available in Blender 3 and above

• Fix Bendy-Bones limb alignment throwing an error because incorrect bone side was evaluated

• Incorrect fingers rotations when adding rig fist

• Error when setting the leg IK offset

Smart:

• Error when removing an optional facial object from the detection

• Error if facial objects are not assigned to any view layers

• Removed any dead BGL call for MacOS compatibility

Skin:

• Bind crashing when an eye object was defined in Facial Features, but no eye bones found

CheckForUpdate: urllib request module import broken in latest python versions Installation: Armature presets path crashing the addon install if the path does not exist yet

3.68

What’s new and improved

Code structure:

• Refactored code to clearly state licensing, “src” folder containing GPL python files, Royalty Free and CC0 for other asset blend files

Rig:

• New leg FK lock setting, similar to arms FK lock

• When binding, removal of existing vertex groups can now be disabled as a default preference. A warning message is displayed at the first bind

• New “Remove Selected Driver” function to remove the corrective driver of the selected shape key, deletes the helper bone as well

• When initializing the armature scale during Match to Rig, the animations can now be scale compensated automatically. A dialog box prompts the user to enable scale compensation or not

• Cosmetic, brought back some colorful icons from Blender 2.79!

• The ChildOf constraints keyframes now works with multiple selected bones

• Master constraints for Tail limbs now works with “Before Original” mix mode to avoid rotation/gimbal issues

• Additional jawbone setup to support head stretch. Old armatures can be updated with the “Update Armature” button to retrofit

• The lips corner mini bone was not deforming by default, while c_lips_smile was. Switched both, since direct skinning for c_lips_corner_mini is preferred over shape keys

• Add basic support for bendy-bones for the Tail limb (Limb Options)

• Add lips offset controller, to move all lips bones at once (Limb Options)

• New Kilt limb to rig dresses, kilts, skirts. Constrained collisions (no dynamic simulations)

• New “All Keyframes” setting in Bake IK-FK functions, to bake all keyframes or only existing keyframes

• New “All Keyframes” setting in Snap Child Of… function to bake only existing keyframes when disabled

• Extended the Spine Count max value to 64

Picker:

• Show a warning if the picker addon is not installed (Misc tab)

• Picker: The picker title is now renamed automatically when setting the character name with “Set Character Name”

Remap:

• New “Clean FK Rotation” when retargetting, to ensure single axis rotations on forearm and leg FK controllers

• New MB Lab preset

• New “Clean IK Poles” setting when retargetting. It used to be always enabled internally but could lead to issues. Now disabled by default.

• Code refactoring to support non-latin bone names (japanese, chinese…). Require to click the “Update” button when prompted, when opening older files.

• Support for bones with the setting “Inherit Rotation” disabled

Skin:

• When binding, used vertex groups are now also searched in geometry nodes attributes, to exclude them from removal

• If binding fails because of scale issue, a popup message now proposes to rebind with Scale Fix enabled automatically

• Added tongue and teeth as automatic facial skinned feature (was eyeballs only so far)

• The toes deforming bone now exactly matches the length of the reference toes bone, for more accurate automatic skinning

Smart:

• Tongue and teeth objects can now be Smart detected for more accurate bone placement

• Cosmetic, new markers icons, also fixing OpenGL error message on MacOS

• The armature is now tagged in order to evaluate if “Match to Rig” has been performed before binding or exporting, to prevent user errors

• Facial markers are now drawn as colored circles and colored lines

Export:

• Added triangulation for Fbx export

• Colorful icons from Blender 2.79 for export buttons

• Lengthy object names were not supported at export time, now throws an error message if names are exceeding 56 characters

• New “Sampling Rate” setting to bake animation subframes when the value is below 1.0

• Since Tangent Space normal export does not comply with N-gons, send an error message if N-gons are found and prevent Fbx export

• Since Soft IK is not Fbx export friendly because of the constant slight leg/arm stretch, added to “Check Rig” warnings

• Updated the Fbx export trunk with latest Blender official Fbx export (support new vertex color attributes for Blender 3.2 and greater)

• Added “Others” in the export engine interface, along Unity and Unreal Engine. Selecting it will hide settings specific to Unity and UE. Useful when exporting to Godot for example.

• Popup message to notify the export is complete (can be disabled in the User Preferences)

• Added “Metacarpal Fingers” setting in the Humanoid type, when exporting as “Others” skeleton

Interface:

• The “Mirror Shape Keys” button was moved to the Shape Keys dropdown menu, and renamed “Mirror All Shape Keys”

• Aligned the checkboxes of actions list (export, rig, remap) on the left for clarity, and display the true prop checkbox for convenience, if Blender greater than 3.5

Check for update:

• Now shows a differential log, comparing the log of the new available version versus the current old version

Fixed

Rig:

• Spine reference bones had incorrectly more than one bbone segment, leading to error when keyframing the whole character

• Add Blink Pose was not resetting bones transform properly after adding the constraint

• IK-FK snap invalid vector angle error

• The Lite version menu was kept hidden

• Removed the extra blank NLA track that was left in the armature presets data. Was interfering with NLA tracks in linked files

• Since the head stretch support update, the jaw was not rotating anymore because of a missing bone when loading the mouth bones

• Incorrect renaming of new Tail, Bendy-Bones and Spline IK limbs if an existing limb was set as a left or right one.

• The Clean Scene operator could accidentally remove used custom shapes, not linked to any collections

• The ChildOf Switcher didn’t work anymore when baking animations, because of a missing update data call

• The ChidOf Switcher did not bake correct transforms when the bone was animated

• The previous fix regarding Tail, Bendy Bones, Spline IK bone side names was erroneous

• “Apply Shape” did not assign the collection and parent object to the custom shape properly if the character or collection were named with “_”

• “Add Hand Fist” had incorrect rotations when moving the c_pinky1_base

Rig Layers:

• Made “Edit Layer…” a movable panel instead of an embedded menu panel to avoid the glitch making it disappear when moving the mouse cursor

Picker:

• Missing eyelids

Remap:

• Fixed incorrect location values when retargetting multiple actions by resetting the target rig pose to zero

• Unbind leading to error because of missing clean_ik_pole attribute

• The “IK Axis Correc” setting was not imported/exported into bmap preset files

• The “IK Axis Correc” setting was not supporting armatures with rotation different from 0

Skin:

• Error while using edge selection mode with “Set Eyelids Borders”

• Make sure the current armature modifier has a target armature

• Unbind button was not removing armature modifiers if the related setting was disabled in the pref (when binding)

• Error when binding new facial features

• Blender 3.6 crash when transferring vertex groups via modifiers. Use lower level functions instead.

• ‘ard’ error when binding with the new teeth functions

• Error “c_lips_smile”

Smart:

• Error crash when facial markers were invalid

• Switched to marker images, to fix error on MacOS with Metal backend due to OpenGL functions not supported

• Error handling when spine detection failed because of holes in the chest

• Incorrect head top detection when characters had floating feet above the floor

• Error when running “Facial Only” mode, missing toes marker

Export:

• Broken export when the scene was duplicated as a Full Copy and linked overrides

• Custom renaming and UE renaming were conflicting

• Error when exporting meshes with topology changing modifiers (Decimate) and shape keys

• Incorrect thigh parent when exporting as Universal with more than 1 twist bone

• Error when the Rig Name was set to none

• Error when exporting animations as multiple Fbx files but no exported actions were found

• NLA Tweak mode not properly supported when exporting only the active action

• Inconsistencies with twist bones export and soft-link

• Ensure to turn off “Push Additive” if Secondary Controllers are not set to “Additive”

• Error when exporting shape keys with topology changing modifiers that were not enabled in viewport but in render only

• Rename bones from file was not properly executed when setting the humanoid armature manually

• Incorrect armature transforms when the armature objects had constraints or drivers on transform channels

• Rig name with more than 56 characters were not supported, now throws an warning message to circumvent the error

• Error with the Actions Manager and invalid actions

• Interface, aligned the checkboxes of the action select panel on the left for clarity, and display the true prop checkbox for convenience, if Blender greater than 3.5

• Custom properties export for (custom bones only, and edit mode only) was broken

• Some debug lines were erreneously commented out in the release version

• Broken animation export due to invalid variable syntax (recent naming refactor)

• The Units settings were reset to default after export

• The c_lips_corner_mini was not exported, while it was set to Deform by default in latest update

• New kilt bones did not export when enabling “Mannequin Axes”

• Custom bones could be incorrectly parented because of incorrect names conditions

• Gltf export was always clipping animations to current scene range

Version:

• Compatibility issues with Blender 4.0

• Lite version critical error

• Smart maker display compatibility issue with Blender pre 3.4 versions

3.67

What’s new and improved

Rig:

• Multiple eyelids support, allowing to rig a wide range of eyelids design

• New eyelid tweak controller, to adjust the upper/lower eyelids curvature

• New Add Blink Pose to setup a pose with closed eyelids, adding constraints for the current pose. In-between poses can be added on the fly for half-closed eyelids

• Add Hand Fist was redesigned, it’s no more necessary to create the action and set keyframes manually (same as Add Blink Pose). Just click the button with fingers in a fist or extended pose to setup the controller and constraints

• Apply Pose as Rest Pose now support animation preservation, to ensure animations do not break when changing the rest pose. Can bake one keyframe per frame (best accuracy with interpolated motions) or only existing keyframes

• The eye reference bone can now have a custom parent, in case c_eye_offset must not be parented to the head/skull bones by default

• Limbs are now alphabetically sorted in the Add Limb list

• Edit Shape: Auto switch to vertex select mode, and select all vertices

• Edit Shape: Mirror shape scale as well

• Add Armature now also loads all existing actions from custom armature presets

• Set teeth custom shapes horizontal by default

• Add automatic LimitScale constraint to the wings fold controller

• Init Scale is now an object setting instead of scene. When enabled, if scale keyframes are found, a message pops up before Match to Rig to warn the action will be unlinked from the armature

• Import-Export rig data now keeps the filepath in file memory

• Check for Update: the release log can now be opened in a web browser

• QuickRig: Preserved rigs can now be unlocked, may be useful for small tweaks but not always safe (use it at your own risks!)

Skin:

• Shortcut button to show the deforming bone layer, if enabling Selected Bones Only (Bind settings)

• New preference setting to remove existing armature modifiers when binding (so far, they were automatically removed). This is useful in case additional existing armature modifiers must not be removed (to mix with/without preserve volume for example)

• Improved Refine Head Weights, smoother deformations in the neck/jaw area when facial is disabled

Old method

New method

Smart:

• Better handling of errors when markers are ouf ot mesh

• New Clavicles Align toggle. Enabled automatically with the UE5 preset

Remap:

• New DeepMotion preset

• New Rigify preset

• Update the XSens preset with fingers

Export:

• Show Debug Tools has been renamed > Show Extras . These extra features are still hidden by default for safety, because the break compatibility with other editing/exporting tools of ARP

• New Unset feature to revert the Set Humanoid Rig/Set Mped Rig features under Show Extras. Setting the exported armature allows to send to the UEbridge addon

• Sort alphabetically actions in the actions manager

• GLTF: The frame range settings are now displayed for GLTF export as well

• GLTF: Actions export as multiple files now supports GLTF as well

Version:

• Support Python 3.11 when opening files

Fixed

• Rig: Removing custom limbs was not removing the correct entry

• Rig: SplineIK limb with custom names were missing Rig Main Properties

• Rig: SplineIK root parent was assigned the parent of the parent incorrectly

• Rig: Incorrect default eyelids position

• Rig: Remaining eyelids when disabling facial

• Rig: Bendy-bones chains were not deforming by default

• Rig: Import Custom Limbs could import color groups with incorrect colors

• Rig: Disable internally auto-keyframe when Match to Rig to prevent errors

• Rig: IK-FK snap did not handle the Arm Lock-Free setting properly

• Rig: Bake IK-FK was not supporting quaternions

• QuickRig: Preserve mode was not compatible with multiple twist bones

• Skin: Rest Pose error with VHDS skinning

• Skin: Error when binding with eyelids borders set

• Skin: Bind functions accidentally left in debug mode

• Skin: Error with voxelized objects having negative scale

• Skin: Binding objects with names exceeding 60 characters was leading to an error

• Smart: Make sure to enable selection filters, otherwise they interfere with the addon if disabled

• Smart: Error when detecting only facial bones

• Smart: Ensures correct global scale when detecting only facial, by measuring the distance between the eyes

• Smart: The Fingers Thickness value was inverted

• Export: Error when applying modifiers over shape keys, while a modifier is enabled on render level but not viewport level

• Export: Modifiers were not applied

• Export: Error with meshes having Subsurf modifiers and shape keys, while Subsurf is disable at export time

• Export: Spine bend bones had incorrect parent as humanoid

3.66

What’s new and improved

Rig:

• Lips upgrade to support a wide range of mouth design: Multiple lips bones, master bones, curviness control, limit soft lips, Lips roll constraints, “Jaw Speed Fac” setting to adjust the jaw rotation speed when moving the controller

• Spine upgrade, added an optional spine Master Controller, to rotate or translate all spine bones at once, including stretch and squash

• Support free IK bones roll (arms, legs). New “Auto IK Roll” setting added in “Limb Options”, to enable free roll when the setting is switched off. Seamless IK-FK switch in free mode is still supported thanks to a more advanced IK-FK snapper

• Added “Soft IK” for arms (so far was only for legs)

• New “Remove Custom Limbs…” menu to selectively delete any custom limbs added previously

• Set Pose: Added a new “Exact Rotation” setting, to use exact rotation matrix from the UE Mannequin A pose, otherwise use the shortest rotation, preserving as much as possible the bone roll (Y axis)

Skin:

• Exclude vertex groups used by other modifiers and hair systems from removal when binding/unbinding

• Support binding with linked armatures

Remap:

• Added a “Clear Current Bones List” setting when importing presets, so that existing source bones in the list that are not part of the preset can be preserved if this setting is disabled

• Filter to display the .bmap files only in the browser window when exporting presets

• Ensure the bones list index is preserved after retargetting

• Show a warning if bone names are too long (more than 50 characters), since this is not supported when retargetting

Smart:

• A connection line is now drawn between markers

Export:

• Now supports GLTF/GLB format, thanks to the latest features of the Blender GLTF exporter added by Julien Duroure

• Apply any modifiers over shape keys is now supported, including Subsurf in option

• Now the twist bones position match accurately the UE humanoid skeleton. This avoids the need to set to “Skeleton” retargetting translation type for these bones

• Support multiple lips

• Added a “Legacy” menu

• New “Bake Axis Conversion” setting for Unity, overriding Units x100 and armatures/meshes rotation initialization

• The rest pose data can now be exported when no meshes are exported. However the extra “dummy” mesh is still necessary when importing in UE (UE limitation)

• The exported file path is now saved in file, restored for the next session

• Added “A-Pose (UE5)” in the “Set Pose” menu to comply with UE5 Manny skeleton

Picker:

• Support multiple spine bones

UI:

• Filter .py files format when importing/exporting rig data

• Facial options redesigned

Fixed

UI:

• The “Misc” tab could be displayed empty at first opening

• Added a timout to “Check for Updates” in case the server is down

• “Check for Updates” broken

Rig:

• Support for new constraints attributes when exporting/importing custom limbs

• Edit bones children attributes had to be skipped when exporting custom limbs

• Snapping IK-FK arms didn’t use the actual IK pole distance value of the arm but the leg instead

• The leg Roll Cursor Factor was increasing cyclicly when not set to 1

• Removed “toes_end_ref”, obsolete hidden bone

Skin:

• “Selected Vertices Only” was unselecting vertices after binding

Smart:

• Skip Solidify modifiers, prone to errors

• When using Facial only, the spine was always overridden to 3 spine bones

Remap:

• Make sure to reset bone transforms before retargetting

Export:

• Objects parented to bones had non-initialized scale, multiplied by 100 if “x100 Units” on

• If the armature had non initialized scale, exporting the c_foot_roll_cursor animation was incorrect

• Fixed incorrect parenting to spline IK tip bone

• “Push Additive” was also applied to Twist secondary controllers, which is not valid

• Linked meshes were localized after export

3.65

What’s new and improved

Version:

• Support for Blender 3.2, the proxy attribute has been removed

Remap:

• Multiple animation retargetting

• New “Fake User” setting to keep the remapped action even if not used. Always enabled when retargetting multiple animations

• New modes for IK poles: “Absolute”, “Relative:Target”, “Relative:Chain”. So far it was always set to absolute, which means evaluating the true IK pole vector (which could lead to IK flipping in case of straight angles) unless “Auto-Pole” was checked, which is the equivalent of “Relative:Target”. The new “Relative:Chain” mode operates as if the IK pole is a child of the first bone in the IK chain, which can lead to better results.

• Improved the IK pole position

• “IK World Space” setting to compute the IK positions in world space, works better if the character is spinning by 180° at some point

• Added an Auto-Rig Pro preset

Rig:

• Teeth and tongue as facial sub-limb

• New Arm Lock setting to change the FK upperarm parent space

• Fingers Rot From Scale setting for the thumb

• New Sticky Lips setting, so that the upper lips collide with the lower lips when the mouth is shut

• Send an error message when creating a corrective driver with 0 angle

• “Snap Child Of…” now supports animation baking

• Duplicating and mirroring a limb now ensures to set the same dupli ID as the original bone side (if available)

Export:

• Bone renaming using a custom file

• Support for UE5 humanoid skeletons

• Display the Root Motion setting for Unity as well

• Use original object mesh data name for export. Since it may be a breaking change for current projects, a toggle has been added in the Legacy menu for backward-compatibility

• New custom scripted instructions for export, using an external python script file

Smart:

• Presets for UE4 (4 spine bones, 1 neck, 1 twist) and UE5 skeletons (6 spine bones, 2 necks, 2 twists)

• The fingers amount setting is now an int property

Fixed

Version:

• Fixed frame range values being float types in Blender 3.1 instead of integer, leading to an error

• Fixed the mesh conversion error in Blender 3.1.2

• Fixed Fingers IK generation in Blender 3.2

• Now use the “enabled” attribute for constraints instead of “mute” for Blender 3.0 and later (although seems still backward-compatible)

• Bug with the new Blender version getter and release candidates

Rig:

• Duplicating facial bones was leading to incorrect bone names

• Showing IK lines was not working properly if the armature object was not in the center of the world

• “Set Picker Cam” broken with Blender 3.2

• “Capture Facial” broken with 3.2

• The third bone leg wasn’t enabled for duplication when selected

• The 0-1 buttons of Shape Keys Drivers Tools couldn’t work when the driver wasn’t using an expression

• Bendy-bones names with ‘_’ character wasn’t supported

• “Set Picker Cam” wasn’t working when the rig was translated along the Z axis

• Incorrect parent retargetting “c_root.x” > “c_root_master.x”

Remap:

• Throw an error if the root bone has no target

• Straight IK bones chain were not fixed automatically in some cases

• Retargetting while already bound was not working

• IK angle correction could lead to invert axes after the correction

• Interactive Tweaks were not applied when loaded from preset, and internal update issue

Export:

• Error with UE4 legacy option

• Error with relative file path for bone renaming

• Error when exporting fingers to Unity humanoid, introduced by the new UE5 humanoid settings

• Fail to export animations if some bones were holding properties to drive shape keys, but exported with a different name

• Spline IK export was broken (renaming)

• Exporting with the mesh original name could lead to some .001 prefixes

• Correct the Fbx shader’s alpha value

• Root incorrect rotation since it was not initialized when baking each action

3.64

What’s new and improved

Rig

• New facial sub-limbs, eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, cheeks, chins can now be enabled or disabled individually from the “Limb Options” menu

• New “Duplicate Mirror” button to duplicate and mirror a limb to the other side (left>right or right>left)

• Dog and Horse preset updated with 3 bones leg

• Tail limbs have now a side setting (left, right, or middle), and an “Update Transforms” toggle in case bones transforms must not be initialized when clicking Limb Options

Rig Layers

• The show and hide buttons have been merged into a single toggle. It’s more convenient to instantly see what layer is hidden or revealed, however the only drawback is it may get out of sync if objects or bones in the rig layers are shown or hidden using other features that the Rig Layers list.

• Support for animated visibility (Rig Layers dropdown menu > Animated Layers)

• Added a select toggle to select bones belonging to the layer

• Toggles to show or hide the exclusive and select toggles

Rig Tools

• Bones custom properties are now displayed in the Rig Main Properties tab for convenience. Properties can also be pinned to remain always on display, regardless of the selection

• New “Snap Child Of” tool to quickly switch from one Child Of constraint to another, while preserving the original coordinates of the bones. Includes a keyframe button to keyframe all Child Of constraints influence, and support automatic keyframing.

• The “Snap IK/FK” and “Bake IK/FK” buttons were renamed (Snap FK > IK is now Snap IK > FK) in order to be more understandable and intuitive (eventhough the FK chain is actually snapped onto the IK when clicking Snap IK > FK)

Remap

• New Interactive Tweak (Bind) mode to apply interactive tweaks in binding mode only

• New Character Creator preset

• Improved the Unreal Mannequin preset with FK leg bones and c_spine_03.x

• New Perception Neuron preset

Smart

• Cosmetic, the green markers circles are now anti-aliased

• Knees could still have inverted pole angle if character models had legs curved backward, a better routine now ensures that knees point frontward

Export

• New settings to export actions as multiple Fbx files

Misc

• New “Check for Updates” button in the Misc tab

Fixed

• Rig: import-export custom shapes Blender 3.0 compatibility issue

• Rig: Apply Pose as Rest pose didn’t support ear bones

• Rig: Apply Pose as Rest Pose was not supporting shape keys drivers with other shape keys as variables

• Rig: When Secondary Controllers are in “Bendy Bones” mode, switched leg bendy bones to “Tangent” end handle for better twist results

• Skin: Specials > Two Eyballs still gave incorrect skinning for the given eyeballs

3.63

What’s new and improved

Versioning

• Blender 3.0 support! And still backward-compatible with Blender 2.8x, 2.9x versions.

Rig

• Feet and arms Z axis now points upward by default, which is more conventional.

  • Warning, clicking “Match to Rig” will lead to wrong arms rotation when used with old rigs, enable “Old Arms Alignment” in the “Legacy” panel to fix it, or click “Update Armature” to correct old axes.

• Support for generating multiple Auto-Rig Pro armatures in the same file

• New “Soft IK” setting for legs, to avoid the typical knee pop when the leg is switching from straight to flexed pose. Note, this leads to slightly stretched bones in order to soften the IK pop, then this setting remains optional (Limb Options)

• New bind setting “Selected Bones Only” to bind only to selected bones

• The bind setting “Exclude Selected Verts” was changed to “Selected Vertices Only”, leading to the opposite and more intuitive behavior

• The utility to convert Quaternions <-> Euler rotations can now bake only existing keyframes instead of all frames, selected or all bones, and supports all Euler orders

• The rig functions (snap IK-FK and others) are now based on bone selection, instead of active bone. This means bones can now be selected with box selection for example

• “Apply Pose as Rest Pose” now shows a warning if some instanced meshes are found (multiple users), since they’re not compliant with it

• Armatures object transforms (location, rotation) are now unlocked by default

• Bones added as new limbs or limbs options, are now positioned properly when the armature object is translated or rotated.

Smart

• Support for multiple armatures in the same file

Export

• Support of NLA as a global animation track instead of exporting each action separately

• For Unreal-Humanoid export, the IK Hand Gun animation is now supported

Remap

• Full refactor of the remap features for better performances/easier usage

• New “Preserve” mode when clicking “Redefine Rest Pose”.

  • When enabled, the actual rest pose of the source armature remains untouched. It only takes a snapshot of the newly defined pose, and use it to offset the bones transforms when retargetting.

  • If disabled (the old way) the actual rest pose is modified, and the animation is re-baked, based on the new rest pose

• Freezing armatures object transforms is now optional, retargetting should work even with non-zeroed out objects coordinates (rotation different from 0, scale different from 1).

• A new “Show Freeze Warnings” button has been added to hide or show freeze warning prompts

• Location/IK/Root remapping is now faster, the pre-baking phase is no more necessary

• When redefining the rest pose, the rest of the menu is now hidden (it was confusing and prone to error to have all other buttons still visible)

Fixed

• Rig: Harmless update issue when snapping IK-FK arms

• Rig: The “Align Skulls” setting was displayed incorrectly at the bottom of the row

• Rig: “Apply Pose as Rest Pose” crashing with hidden collections

• Rig: The 0-1-Reset shape keys drivers buttons were greyed out

• Rig: Ensures bones from duplicated limbs have correct color group

• Rig: The “Stretch Length” value of the FK bone was by mistake linked to the IK bone (silly)

• Export: The armature was not exported if it was selected but not active, while “Only Selected Objects” is enabled

• Export: Error when a bone was marked as custom bone, but already part of the base rig. It’s now bypassed.

• Export: The ear bones weights were transferred to the head weight, while it’s no more necessary

• Smart: Bug with the toes detection if the character had feet below the ground

• Remap: The “Add IK Cns” setting was not saved in preset

3.62

What’s new and improved

• Rig: Rig Layers are now compatible with Library Overrides

• Rig: Better alignment of stretch and pin controllers of arms and legs by default. Since this can break animation compatibility with previous rigs, a toggle has been added in the Legacy popup.

• Rig: New Import-Export settings: import reference bones transforms for selected bones only + custom shapes toggle

• Rig: Rig Layers can now be imported or exported, as files to custom location and as preset for quick import later from the dropdown list

• Rig: The “Set Pose” feature now maintains the feet/hips height, skipping manual tweaks

• Rig: ~60-150% speedup when clicking “Match to Rig”, by refactoring and optimizing functions

• Rig: “Set Picker Cam” now works with proxies without making a proxy of the camera, if “Instance Collection” is enabled (external contribution, thanks to PiOverFour)

• Rig: Euler keyframes can now be converted to Quaternion for a given frame range and vice versa, with a new tool to convert selected bones rotations

• Rig: New “Head Lock” default setting in the addon preferences to have it enabled or disabled by default

• Rig: New IK-FK default setting for arms and legs, in “Limb Options” panel for per-limb setting, and in the addon preferences as global settings

• Rig: Tail limbs can now be added multiple times, and duplicated as well

• Smart: Enable automatically “Refine Head Weights” if there is no facial markers for better skinning results

• Smart: More accurate heel bones detection

• Smart: The smart detection now supports facial only (up to now, facial required body as well)

• Export: New “Actions Manager” to group actions to export by list (thanks Jesper for supporting). Useful when dealing with dozen of actions.

• Export: Non Auto-Rig Pro armatures can now be exported (thanks Jesper for supporting)

• Export: Added “Embed Texture” setting in the Misc tab, similarly to the Blender’s default Fbx exporter

• Export: Support multiple tail limbs

• Export: Exported actions names can now contain only the base name, instead of ArmatureName|ActionName, plus additional settings to replace the “|” character with “_” or “-”

Fixed

• Export: “Set Soft-link bone” was applied to bones from opposite side if X-Mirror was enabled

• Export: Soft-link was leading to inconsistent thigh and arm bones position when “Secondary Controllers” was “None”

• Export: Error if multiple neck bones without parent

• Export: Error when setting custom bones

• Export: Fingers with ‘Rot from Scale’ had incorrect scale

• Export: Eyelids issue

• Rig: Binding could lead to bones being overstretched if X-Mirror was enabled

• Rig: Breast bones not parented automatically in some cases

• Rig: Adding the hand fist controller did not work when fingers were not in layer 0

• Rig: “Apply Pose as Rest Pose” and binding operations not compliant with some modifiers such as Multires

• Rig: Feather controller are now in Euler rotation mode by default when created

• Skin: Vertices selection were not restored

• Remap-Export: Incorrect euler rotation values when baking animation in some cases

• Smart: Thumb and pinky bones could be swapped in some caes, fixed by adding more tests in fingers location values

• Smart: After detecting, only restore visibility of hidden objects when starting the detection, instead of all objects

• Smart: Vertex size could not be restored if an error was thrown before the end of the process

• Smart: “Facial Only” could lead to re-scale the existing rig

3.61

What’s new and improved

• Rig: New Rig Layers menu, to quickly hide or show rig components: armature layers, bones, collection and objects. Useful to toggle some features of a character (clothes, props…) or show/hide a given set of controllers.

• Rig: Skull bones are now optional and disabled by default

• Rig: Interface of rig tools/settings has been improved with imbricated sub-panels for better clarity

• Rig: Extended maximum arms/legs twist bones amount to 32

• Rig: By default some secondary controllers were just hidden, leading to display them when revealing all bones (Alt-H), even when Secondary Controllers were set to None. This was a bit of a problem, the code has been refactored to hard-delete and create bones on the fly when clicking Match to Rig.

• Rig: Renamed internal property to avoid conflict. Required to click the Update button (as prompted automatically) with old armatures

• Skin: Binding performances significant speed up. Although the weight improvement functions were useful (smooth twist bones weights, refining hips weights…) they were bloated with lots of overhead. Binding is now from 3 to 5 times faster (!) after minimizing Python code overhead and optimizing functions with dedicated built-in operators.

• Skin: New “Improve Heel Weights” setting to improve automatic skinning in the ankle/heel area

• Skin: Warning message when binding meshes with more than 150.000 polygons, can be slow

• Export: Less than 3 spine bones are now supported as Humanoid type (3 was the minimum before)

• Export: Improved consistency with the actions export dialog, added messages relative to “Only Active” and warn if no actions are exported

• Remap: Static source bones (not animated) are now supported, they appear in the bones list

• Remap: When importing a preset, the browser now uses automatic filtering for .bmap format files

Fixed

• Export: Overridden and proxy armatures export breakage with Blender 2.93

• Export: Spine bend bones could not be exported when more than 2

• Export: Avoid and fix vertex group names conflict

• Skin: Eyelids weights improvements were broken in some cases

3.60

What’s new and improved

• Rig: Shapes keys can now be automatically mirrored with drivers, support corrective drivers/corrective bones

• Rig: Auto-Stretch is set to 0.0 by default to new armatures

• Rig: IK-FK shapes are now scaled with linear interpolation drivers, to ease selection (before, bones were hidden). To apply to old armatures, click “Update Armature” in the Misc tab of Auto-Rig Pro

• Rig: IK pole position improved when snapping, now in-line with the knees/elbows

• Rig: New tweak twist setting for arm and thigh bones, to correct bad twisting with extreme arms/legs angles. To apply to old rigs, click “Update Armature”

• Rig: A log message now reports detailed changes when clicking “Update Armature”

• Skin: UI Cosmetic change, skinning features as separate engine

• Skin: Expose new setting: Smooth Twist Weights, Refine Head Weights (aka “Use Chin” previously), Improve Hips Weights

• Skin: The Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning addon is now directly embedded as a binding engine (the addon must still be installed separately), supporting post-skinning improvement features of Auto-Rig Pro.

• Smart: Improved fingers detection with forearm rotated forward

• Smart: New options to set spine bones count, straight spine, spine troot orientation upward automatically

• Smart: Improved automatic knee position for IK pole constraints

• Export: New “Only Selected Bones” option to export only selected bones (Thanks to Jesper for contributing!)

• Export: New “Soft Linking” option to maintain animated bones scale to 1, allowing cheap stretch effect in game engines without actually scaling bones which lead to issues (Thanks to Jesper for contributing!)

• Export: New “Markers” setting for frame range, to export only frames between markers named “start” and “end” (Thanks to Jesper for contributing!)

Fixed

• Rig: Deleting the picker was broken

• Rig: Incorrect rotation of root bones as custom override shapes

• Remap: Incorrect fingers rotations with IK hands

• Smart: Fixed incompatibility with fingers detection in Blender 2.92

• Smart: Fingers detection issues when mesh rotation mode was set to “Axis Angle”

• Export: Error with unexpected custom properties

• Export: Bone transforms error when no animations were exported with UE options under certain circumstances

• Export: Fix offset in animation IK bones transforms

• Export: Clean temporary actions if necessary by clicking “Check Rig”

3.59

What’s new and improved

• Rig: New Fingers IKs option for arm limbs

Backward-compatible with older rigs. Fingers IK-FK switch and snap IK target on finger tip/ or third phalange bone root. Can be changed on the fly. Custom shape and color options Parent options Automatic Free-Lock IK targets parent

• UI: Enhanced the arm options interface layout

• Export: New animation export options: export only the active action + frame range settings. Thanks to Jesper for funding these features!

• Export: New buttons to quickly set/unset the selected bones as custom bones for export

• Export: IK bones for Unreal now support animation

• Export: Allow export of humanoid without neck/head

• Remap: New option to use the current pose or real rest pose when redefining the armature rest pose

• Remap: New “Rokoko” preset compliant with new Rokoko bone names convention

• Skinning: Voxelize could not work in certain cases. Improved with more accurate internal tests

• Skinning: Voxelize could lead to vertices with no weight in certain cases

Fixed

• Rig: Error with IK Fingers

• Rig: Ensures spine bend bones are hidden when secondary controllers are set to None

• Skinning: Scale Fix did not work with some very low scale models. As a fix, doubled the scale factor.

• Skinning: Remove warnings in the console

• Export: Bottom bones not exporting

• Export: Ear bones parent could be wrong when exporting as humanoid

• Export: Animation Layer addon and action blend type different than “Replace” fix

• Export: Splines IK and UE options error

• Export: Issue with Splines IK as proxy

• Export: Only Active did not work if the active action was disabled from export

• Remap: Freeze armature incorrect rotation

• Remap: Error when using an ARP as target armature with scale value different from 1

• Remap: Ensures the target armature is set to pose position when cancelling Redefine Rest Pose

3.58

What’s new and improved

• Rig: New operators to import and export custom shapes

• Rig: Custom names for Spline IK and Bendy-bones chains are now allowed (Limb Options)

• Rig: Buttons to quickly toggle visibility of layers of controllers (expandable) in the Rig Main Properties tab

• Rig: Deleting the rig data with the X button now ensures the whole rig hierarchy is deleted even if the rig is not selected

• Export: Support for custom Spline IK names

• Export: Support overridden armatures

• Remap: Improved remapping technic for the root bone and IK bones, replaced with a new “relative” mode. This leads to better results when remapping to different skeleton proportions.

• Remap: The Freeze Armature operator is now applied automatically when retargetting

• Remap: “Redefine Rest Pose” now also applies on base meshes if any

• Remap: Support overridden armatures

• Remap: Print baking progress status (% percentage) in the console when retargetting

Fixed

• Rig: Duplicating a bendy-bone chain limb was broken

• Rig: Import custom shape error when the bone is missing

• Smart: The right eyeball postion was incorrect when Mirror was disabled

• Smart: 2 fingers detection could lead to an error

• Export: Support for new splines IK advanced options

• Export: Breast bones were missing animation

• Export: Compatibility error with Blender 2.90 materials

• Export: Breast parent lost

• Export: Twist bone transform bug when enabling UE mannequin options

• Export: Shape keys animation errors due to update issues with proxy armatures

3.57

What’s new and improved

• Rig: New advanced options for IK Splines:

• Master controllers with predefined spacing (frequency) for global shape tweaking

• Inter controllers for more accurate tweaks

• Individual bone controllers for micro tweaks

• Inter controllers Interpolation: Smooth or Linear

• Twist value to twist the whole bone chains starting at the selected bone up to the tip

• Rig: IK Spline: “None” option for parent of tips

• Rig: IK Spline: Increase max count value to 1024

• Export: Root Motion + Init Armature Rotation is now supported

• Remap: Refactored the mapping presets interface with only 2 buttons for simplicity: Import and Export

• Remap: New drop-down menu to import built-in presets

Fixed

• Skin: “Exclude Selected Vertices” did not restore the vertice selection after binding

• Rig: Exporting custom presets did not save multiple drivers of same channels type

• Rig: Mirroring custom shape could lead to an error if collections are not set properly

• Export: Avoid error when UV layers are invalid

• Smart: Fingers detection issue with Blender 2.91

3.56

What’s new and improved

• Rig: Now supports multiple spine bones up to 32.

• Remap: New button to select in the bones list the bone that is selected in the viewport

• Remap: New “Location” option to remap location data in local/relative space, useful for facial bones

• Remap: Improved automatic bone names mapping

• Remap: Now automatically switch IK-FK properties of Auto-Rig Pro armatures when using IK or FK bones

• Remap: Interactive Tweaks are now stored in the bones data, they are applied back when retargetting

• Remap: Interactive Tweaks are now stored in the preset file

• Export: Removed “Export Humanoid Actions Only” since it should be always enabled by default.

• Export: Removed mp_ and h_ actions prefix for clarity from Fbx animation names. Added a backward compatibility option in the Legacy menu.

Fixed

• Smart: Fingers detection could lead to poor results or fail with recent Blender versions

• Smart: Fingers detection error values were not reset

• Rig: Disabling arm or leg limbs could leave orphan controller bones when set in Twist mode

• Rig: Error with bot bones alignment

• Remap: import export presets fix with tweaks values

• Remap: Location multiplier was broken

• Export: When exporting, the action linked to the rig could be replaced by another one, forcing the user to link back the original action manually. It’s now fixed.

• Export: Support for modifiers when using Units x100: Mirror and Solidify

• Export: Error when objects were in blend file data but not in view layer

• Export: Error with custom bone parented to spine bones

• Export: Support for random character collection name when exporting proxy rig

• Export: Shape keys with non-topology changing modifiers were not exported

3.55

What’s new and improved

• Remap: New option “In Place” to keep the source armature animation at the same place

• Smart: facial markers now supports asymmetrical models, with Mirror disabled

• Export: performance improvements when exporting shape keys

• Rig: New automatic twist for multiple neck bones

• Rig: New bendy bones segment value for the neck

• Rig: A single custom hotkey can now be assigned to the Snap IK-FK function for quick snapping. The internal code was refactored to make it a single function call for legs and arms.

• Rig: For compatibility with the Library Overrides (replacement for the link-proxy system), custom properties of the armature can now be overridden (IK-FK switch, stretch length…). Click the “Update Armature” button in the Misc tab of Auto-Rig Pro to update older armatures properties.

Internal

• Ensure invalid or duplicated drivers are deleted when Match to Rig for optimal performances and avoid warning message in console

• Refactored the update armature function

• Cleanup, removed old functions

• Removed unused bones properties “arp_layer”

• Made export functions compatible with the new neck twists bones

Fixed

• Smart: Error when detecting knees under certain circumstances

• Rig: Backward-compatibility issue with the root bone options

• Remap: Error with proxy armatures

• Remap: Freeze Source Armature did not preserve the animation

• Remap: Ensure skinned meshes and meshes parented to bones are preserved when freezing the armatures animation

• New anim baking: fix error with Blender versions below 2.90

• Export: Bones rotations for Unreal broken with Blender 2.83

• Export: Proxy armatures export was broken with Blender 2.90

• Export: enabling deformation of c_toes_pivot lead to buggy bones export

3.54

What’s new and improved

• Remap-Export: Bake at light speed, x50 speed up! A new custom baking function allows amazing performances (was using the built-in baking function of Blender before). Results are suprisingly impressive: when retargetting 4720 frames, it now takes 15 seconds instead of 14 minutes. Animation baking when exporting to Fbx also benefit from this speed up.

A patch has also been submitted to the Blender developers for inclusion into Blender: https://developer.blender.org/D8808

However, due to code dependencies and optimizations, performances are still greater in Auto-Rig Pro with its dedicated, light function: x50 versus x3.

Credits: Inspired by Philip (Hotox) patch for the Fbx importer: https://developer.blender.org/D7762

Fixed

• Rig: Backward-compatibility issue with the root bone options

• Remap: Error with proxy armatures

3.53

What’s new and improved

• Rig: Head Lock snap

• Skin: Better eyelids skinning

• Skin: Eyelid borders skinning option to limit the eyelid deformation area

• Smart: More accurate knees detection in case of large surrounding meshes (clothes)

Fixed

Compatibility fixes with Blender 2.90:

• Remap: broken IK pole

• Smart: broken finger detections

• Fbx export: broken bones axes when exporting as humanoid mannequin

3.52

What’s new and improved

• Rig: Eyeballs auto skinning in option, the eyeballs meshes can now be perfectly skinned by setting the eyeball objects in the Bind menu (single or two separate objects). Additionally, the c_eye vertex groups are removed from other meshes for better results.

Without/with eyeball auto-skinning:

• Smart: The Rig tab of Auto-Rig Pro is now displayed automatically after the detection, to ease the access of the Match to Rig button

• Rig: Spline IK: New “Smoothness” parameter to increase or decrease the extra smoothing of the curve shape

• Rig: Spline IK: New “Update Transforms” option to update or not the reference bones position when applying changes

• Rig: The rig_add is now automatically deleted if secondary controllers are not set to Additive

• Rig: the mesh_grp empty is now removed from the rig hierarchy for simplicity

• Export: force the UE renaming option to rename the ‘.l’ and ‘.r’ side characters to ‘_l’ and ‘_r’ to enhance compatibility with other applications

• Export: Support of skeleton custom name. Default name was “root”, it can now be renamed on the fly.

Fixed

• Export: Exporting a non-animated rig with “Units x100” could lead to incorrect bones position

• Rig: Spline IK required to click two times “Match to Rig” for correct alignment, due to Stretch To constraints not being reset.

• Rig: incorrect constraint target with feather bones under certain circumstances

• Remap: error when updating the selected target armature

3.51

What’s new and improved

• Smart: Now supports characters models with feet floating above the floor

• Rig: Set A-Pose: The fingers rotation now perfectly match the mannequin fingers

• Rig: Custom speed factor for the eyelid up and down motion

• Rig: Custom speed factor for the c_foot_roll_cursor controller

• Rig: Align c_root_master in option when Match to Rig, to allow custom placement

• Rig: Align c_skulls bone in option when Match to Rig, to allow custom placement

• Rig: Align eyelid bones in option when Match to Rig, to allow custom placement

• Smart: Second voxelization method in option, may help the fingers detection or not depending on the hand topology.

Fixed

• Rig: the feet bone rotation could be incorrect when the feet bones were not perfectly straight, due to incorrect bone roll evaluation. A more efficient method is now used to set it

• Picker: the Main and Secondary buttons could be hidden, ensure at least one of their layer is now displayed

3.50

What’s new and improved

• Rig: Custom Limbs are in! The selected bones can be saved as custom limbs, so that they can be easily added in any armature later. This is the first phase of the implementation, only custom bones are fully supported. Auto-Rig Pro limbs (arms, legs…) as custom limbs will be supported later in the second phase of the implementation.

• Skin: Multiple corrective shape keys per bones are now supported

• Export: Selective action export using checkboxes in option

• Rig: The custom shape edition has been improved to ensure the edited custom shape is always linked to the selected bone

• Export: Allows custom bones export as masters controller (parent of the “root.x” bone)

• Export: For humanoid export, allows location values different from 0 for the spine, neck and head bones

Fixed

• Rig: Bones used for the rotation of corrective shape keys don’t inherit scale anymore from their parent since it was leading to incorrect rotation evaluation

• Rig: Some picker buttons were locked after applying changes

• Rig: Set all picker buttons in layer 0

• Rig: Removed the Reset All button from the picker, since it’s already included in the Rig Main properties interface

• Smart: The fingers detection was broken with the Blender 2.83 update

• Export: Ensure animation export without errors in case meshes have multiple armatures modifiers

3.49

What’s new and improved

• Preferences: The addon main UI and tools UI (IK-FK snap…) can now be displayed in a custom tab name

• Smart: Knees are now in line with the feet, for better legs rotation

• Rig: To visualize the IK direction of reference bones, a line can now be displayed in option for the selected bones chain

• Rig: New armature presets can now be added in the “armature_presets” directory of the addon, they are loaded into the list on Blender startup

• Rig: New “Roll Cursor Distance” to adjust the visual c_foot_roll_cursor distance from the foot

• Rig: The hand fist controller now allows negative scale values to spread the fingers, and limit constraints have been added, [0.5 - 1.5] scale range

• Rig: The stretch length default value of feet and arms is now 1.0

• Export: The shaky bones issue should now be gone with a better evaluation of bone matrices and rotations

• Export: Since Unity can support twist bones using scripts, twist bones export for humanoid is now added in the interface

Fixed

• Rig: The ChildOf constraints of the arm IK pole were not reset when Match to Rig, leading to an offset when snapping IK-FK

• Rig: Setting the arm ik pole distance could fail

• Rig: The hand fist constraints was missing from “c_thumb1_base”

• Smart: Cancelling facial setup could lead to an error

3.48

What’s new and improved

• Rig: Bendy bones chains

• Export: The Generic export has been removed, leaving only Humanoid and Universal. It was leading to many problems and was not that used.

• Remap: Automatic IK constraint setup

• Remap: New tool to Freeze the target armature (rotations different from 0 must be frozen)

• Multiple neck bones are now supported for the humanoid export

• 20% speed improvement when exporting humanoids for Unreal with Mannequin bones orientation

Fixed

• Rig: Issue with the new tail settings

• Rig: Duplicating ear bones was only duplicating 2 bones

• Smart: Meshes with delta transforms were not compatible

• Export: “Initialize Armature Rotation” was broken

• Export: The dummy mesh when exporting the armature only was no more added in the Fbx file

• Export: Exporting multiple actions with root motion could lead to incorrect root position

• Export: The custom bones list was not initialized

• Export: Disabling the humanoid action only for export was leading to an error when baking shape keys

3.47

What’s new and improved

• Rig: New “Spline IK” limb, to add generic spline ik chains.

• Rig: Adjustable amount of bones, bendy-bones per bone, and the side can be set (left, right, middle).

• Rig: Useful to rig ropes, strings… Can be used to replace the current FK spine: it’s recommended to keep one spine bone for the pelvis area (“c_root_master.x” and “root.x” bones), and parent the Spline IK to it.

• Rig: New “3 bones leg” in option, adding another leg bone at the root. The IK constraint still operate on the last 2 bones only for now, a 3 bones IK constraint may be added later (it requires deeper changes to make it compatible with IK-FK, stretch…)

• Rig: Duplicate limbs now works with duplicated limbs as well (was restricted to original limb before)

• Rig: After adding a new limb, the reference bones are now selected

• Skin: The Corrective Shapes tool is now universal, it can be used for any bones, not only arms or legs bones. If one bone is selected, it must be an arm or leg bone since this is optimized for these limbs. Otherwise, two bones must be selected as input for the driver angle setup.

• Skin: The Bind button is now compliant with any armature, not only Auto-Rig Pro armatures

• Skin: New “Scale Fix” button to automatically fix the scaling issue (as mentioned in the FAQ). If binding does not work, enable it.

• Smart: Added 3 fingers detection

• Remap: New frame range option to Retarget only a specific frame range

• Remap: New “Bind/Unbind Only” options to test the retargetting before baking it, to save some time

Fixed

• Apparently identical class names could cause installation error in some cases, the classes have been renamed to avoid it.

• Export: Armature object scale was not properly supported

• Smart: Issue with objects containing shape keys

• Smart: The eyelids bones roll could be wrong

3.46

What’s new and improved

• Rig: New Corrective Shapes tool, to easily setup corrective shapes driver of IK-FK limbs (arms, legs). See doc.

• Rig: The 0, 1 and Reset buttons of the Shape Keys Driver tools have been refactored to work with more cases, such as these corrective drivers using bones rotational difference.

• Rig: New Bake IK/FK tool, to snap IK to FK arms and legs and vice versa over a specified frame range

Fixed

• Smart: Issue with keyframed objects

• Rig: The first eyebrow bone was not deforming anymore by default

3.45

What’s new and improved

• Rig: New Bird preset armature

• Rig: New IK Foot Offset controller in option

• Rig: New “Reset” button in the Rig Tools menu to reset all controllers to rest position (similar to the picker’s reset button)

• Rig: New Set T-Pose feature along the previous A-Pose

• Export: Custom bones: so far, custom bones had to be defined with a cc prefix in their name. They can now also be defined by adding a custom property to the bone named “custom_bone” or cc, which allows to lift this naming restriction.

• Export: Added the Check Rig tools buttons to the N key panel

• Export: Check rig tools: now also checks for invalid armature modifiers

Fixed

• Various small fixes

3.44

What’s new and improved

• Rig: New Wings bones, allowing advanced feathers rigs.

• Export: Support of wing bones

• Export: New “Check Rig” feature to check for possible errors, especially issues related to scale/stretch, leading to rotations error in the exported Fbx.

• Export: New “Fix Rig” feature to fix the errors when possible (set legs and arms stretches to 0, disable Preserve Volume…)

• Export: Bones are now sorted alphabetically in the Fbx file

Fixed

• Various small fixes

3.43

What’s new and improved

• Rig: New “Twist” mode for secondary controllers. It adds controller bones for every twist bones, and wrap them onto bendy bones for smooth control. Best for Fbx export, for 1:1 export of the secondary bones and weights (up to now weights were slightly modified when exporting in Additive mode).

• Rig: New “Voxelize” method to improve skinning of meshes made of multiple separate parts. Less accurate with small parts (fingers, facial…).Note: this is not a true voxel skinning implementation, but an approximated method. It’s not as foolproof as the Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning addon, neither as fast (around 30 seconds to bind for a standard character at 8 resolution), but still produces better results than the base skinning method most of the time. It’s convenient to use it in combination with “Exclude Selected Verts” to mix voxels/default skinning results (e.g. to use different skinning methods for fingers and facial).

• Rig: New “Exclude Selected Verts” option to exclude the selected vertices from skinning. Useful when using the Voxelize option to preserve fingers or facial skinning, or after adding new bones to the rig to prevent some skinned areas to be skinned again.

• Rig: New “Preserve Volume” option to enable or disable this option in the armature modifier when binding (dual quaternions skinning). Should be disabled when exporting to game engines.

• Rig: Automatic A-Pose to pose a rig character as the UE Mannequin. Useful when exporting to Unreal Engine (must be used with “Apply Pose as Rest Pose”)

• By default, secondary controllers are now set to None.

• Rig: To avoid name clashing/collision when linking as a proxy, the rig collection has been renamed “charactername_grp_rig”

• Export: Twist mode support for secondary controllers, in Universal and Humanoid mode

• Cosmetic: Enlarged the “Match to Rig” and “Bind/Unbind” buttons

• Cosmetic: The color of left controllers has been brightened to be more visible on the default dark background of Blender 2.8

Fixed

• Rig: The picker bone could accidentally deform meshes

• Rig: If the secondary controllers are set to None or Twist, all additive bones deformation are now disabled when binding.

• Rig: Workaround an internal bug preventing drivers to be deleted

• Export: Improved “Fix Fbx Bones Rotation” function, could be still buggy in some cases.

3.42

What’s new and improved

• Rig: Multiple twist bones generation for the arms and legs. The next step is to implement a third mode for secondary controllers: “Twist”, to use twist bones as secondary controllers, for 1:1 export compatibility.

• Export: Normals can now be exported in tangent space

• Export: Support of multiple twist bones in Universal and Humanoid modes, for better compatibility with game engines without dual quaternion skinning

• Export: “Transfer Twist” has been renamed “Export Twist”, behaving in the opposite way: if enabled, twist bones are exported. This is more straightforward and easier to understand

• Export: Export: More tabs to avoid scrolling

Fixed

• Export: Breast weights were not exported when Advanced was disabled and Mannequin Axes enabled

• Export: Fix Bones Rotation that could lead to invert the bone roll

• Export: Smart: Force Solid view mode when entering Setup Facial, to make sure facial markers are visible

3.4x for Blender 2.80

Rig Update

Read this to update your old rigs from Blender 2.79 to Blender 2.8. Rigs coming from Blender 2.79 must be converted to the 2.8 standards (layers and groups must be converted to collections, slightly different bones dependency logic). The “update” feature of Auto-Rig Pro will handle this for you. Thus, when opening a rig file from Blender 2.79, a button labelled “UPDATE REQUIRED” will prompt the update.

It is mandatory to click it to make the armature compliant with the Blender 2.8 rig standards. Otherwise, some rig functions will break.

What’s new and improved

2.8 Standards

The whole addon has been ported to the Blender 2.8 python API and the new scene management systems (collections, view layers…) The rig collections are now organized as follow:

• character1 is the master character collection

• character1_rig contains all rig objects such as the armature, picker objects

• character1_cs contains all custom shape objects

• The collections can be renamed, but they must end with “_rig” and “_cs”. In example “joey_rig”, “joey_cs”

Unified Interface

• New unified, compact interface. The fingers, toes and other sub-limbs are now treated as “options”, per limb. They can be accessed by clicking the “Limb Options” button, after selecting a bone from the limb. A window will then popup to access and modify the parameters (facial bones, spine bones amount, neck bones amount, toes, fingers…). Thanks to this, the previous limitations are lifted: toes and fingers can be added or removed from any limbs, even duplicated ones. The main rig panel was becoming a little blocked with too many options and buttons. It’s now better structured and clear.

• The “Add Limb” menu has been brought to all types of armature (it was restricted to “Empty” armatures before). This way, it’s now quick and easy to add any new limbs to any armature.

• The “Enable All” button to enable all limbs has been removed, since it’s now useless.

Set Character Name

The character’s name can now be set easily using the dedicated button. Rig objects and collections are renamed accordingly. E.g, naming a character “matt” will rename the collections to “matt_rig”, “matt_cs”…

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.

Warning: this does not preserve existing animations yet (to do later), since the rest pose is changed, the bones animation will be incorrect (animation are based on the rest pose).

Soft Lips

As an option, the lips can now behave in a more natural way. When moving the lips corner or jaw controller, the other lips controllers will follow softly. To access this option, click the head reference bone then Limb Options.

The Soft Lips: Visual Only option will make the lips controllers follow only visually. Useful when using shape keys to deform the lips corners.

IK Pole and Eye Targets Distance

The IK pole and eye targets distance can now be adjusted, by selecting an arm/leg/head reference bone, then click Limb Options.

Toes Pivot

The feet can now be rotated from a pivot controller around the toes. To enable this controller, check use the checkbox in the Limb Options menu of the leg.

IK-FK

Better seamless IK/FK snap integration: The [IK > FK] and [FK > IK] Snap buttons have been replaced by a single button, that automatically switches and snaps to IK or FK according to the current value. The old manual buttons can still be accessed by clicking the settings icon next to it. After snapping, the respective IK or FK hands/feet are now automatically selected as well. IK switch has never been so easy :)

No Secondary Controllers

The secondary controllers can now be set to “None”, along “Additive (Exportable)”, “Bendy Bones”, to disable all of them.

Smart

The markers selection hotspot is now bigger, making them easier to select. On the cosmetic side, they’re now highlighted on selection and mouse over.

Game Engine Export

• Shape keys animations are now exported properly. When shape keys are driven by bones, the bones no more need to be exported with the same name, not to break the connection, which could lead to complicated setup. To overcome this, shape keys animation data are baked first then sent back to the Fbx file when exporting.

• New option “No Parents” to support stretchy animated bones. Caution though, to achieve this, the bones are unparented so the rig hierarchy is broken.

• The breast bones are now exported with the Humanoid rig even if “Advanced” is disabled.

• The bone’s primary and secondary axes can now be assigned at export time.

• The c_root_bend.x vertex group has been replaced by the root.x vertex group, to avoid skinning clutter. May change a little the skinning in this area, in rigs coming from older versions.

• The Fix Bones Matrix feature has been improved.

• DAE export in progress

Remap

• Better names matching when building the bones list

• Copy Selected Target Bones has been renamed Copy Selected Bones Rotation