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Hey guys, my name is Dometar Zadik and I am the character rigger here at the Blender Animation Studio.

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And in this video series I'd like to show you guys CloudRig, which is a Rigify feature set that I've been developing and using for the upcoming Blender Open Movie sprite fright, which should be coming out later this year.

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If you don't know what Rigify is, the long and short of it is that it's a system that allows you to place a very small number of bones and then you press a button and it gives you a complex character rig that you can use in a production environment.

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This video series won't require any previous Rigify knowledge, but you should know your way around Blender and also having some knowledge about bones and constraints won't hurt either.

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So let's get started by figuring out how to actually acquire CloudRig.

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Just google for Blender CloudRig and then grab the GitLab link, not the GitHub one because that's an old version.

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And then once you are on the GitLab page, if you are using a released stable version of Blender, you want to go to releases and then find the CloudRig version which corresponds to your version of Blender.

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If you are using the latest experimental Blender, which is what I will be doing in this video series, then instead go to this download link because that is the latest experimental version of CloudRig.

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So let's save file and then we can go back to Blender, go to edit, preferences and add-ons.

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And instead of installing CloudRig as an add-on, you search for Rigify, make sure it's enabled and then within Rigify you go install feature set from file.

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And then go to the folder where you downloaded the CloudRig zip to and select it and click add external feature set.

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And now CloudRig should show up here in the Rigify feature set. So CloudRig is not a standalone add-on, it is something that you use to extend to Rigify add-on.

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So next up let's check out if things are working by generating your first rig. So I'm going to open a new file,

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then go to the add menu and under armature, CloudHumans, click on Cloud Basic Human, Metarig.

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And this creates what is a Metarig. So this is the rig that you will be modifying and setting parameters on, which I won't go into in this video but in a later one.

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And then what you are going to do once you've done that is go to the object data properties and then Rigify buttons or in your version of Rigify this might be called Rigify generate.

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And then you click on generate CloudRig. And after a couple of moments you should have your final rig or well not final but your generated rig.

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And let me set the display mode on this to be born so you can see what's going on as I play around with some of these controls. So here you have your IK.

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And if you press the end panel to bring up the sidebar you will also notice there is a CloudRig side panel.

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And this side panel does not require Rigify to this because it just comes from this text file which was created when you generated the rig.

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And the things that you can find in this side panel are for example switching the left arm IK into FK right here. And now it's in FK mode.

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And you can also do that with snapping so you can use this button which is the snapping button and then you press that and then it switches to FK mode and also snaps your FK bones to the IK controls.

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So as you can see this side panel contains all the settings that the animator will have access to once they get the rig. So that was the IK switching and then you also have IK stretch. You can disable if you wish.

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There's also an IK setup for the spine which when enabled behaves like this and if you enable the spine stretching then you can also do stuff like this. So that's useful for cartoony things but maybe not so much for realistic animation.

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And of course by customizing the meta rig some of these features can be disabled and other features can be enabled. For example if you don't need IK arms for some reason then you can certainly just get completely rid of this IK setup with just a checkbox in the meta rig and then generating again.

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There is also a layers panel which you can also customize and you can customize in pretty minute detail the bones that are assigned to each layer so that your animators don't have to use the ugly 32 buttons UI that comes with Blender.

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On top of that if you check in the hotkey section there are some hotkeys on the M and shift M keys that come by default with Cloudrig which actually overwrites the default M and shift M hotkeys of Blender with this UI also so that you basically never have to look at this 32 button layer UI ever because well why would you.

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That said if of course for some reason you don't want these you can simply use these checkboxes and then the default shortcuts will come back and you get the terrible useless UI that you know and love.

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Some other useful shortcuts that you might see here is this one the toggle meta or generated rig which is shift T by default you can of course also customize that if you want, for example, just click on it and press Alt T and now it's an Alt T or if you want to reset it to default and you press this one.

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So if I press shift T now you can see that we are now back on our meta rig so all that does is if I bring up an outliner here as I press shift T.

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It just hides the rig and un-hides the meta rig and selects it and enters the same mode that you're on so if you're in edit mode then it will bring you into edit mode if you're object mode it will bring you into object mode etc.

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And then the final hotkeys of course to generate the rig which is control Alt R by default which is also pretty useful because what you will be doing quite often is changing some parameters or moving some bones around on the meta rig and then you want to regenerate the rig again so if I press control Alt R.

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So there you go it generates the rig for me and it puts me into the same mode as I was on the meta rig as well.

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So I can definitely recommend getting used to these shortcuts or customizing them as you wish because I will be using the toggle meta slash generated rig and they generate all operators quite frequently in my workflow.

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So I hope you like what you see here and if you do I hope to see in the rest of the series where I will show you how you can customize the meta rig to your character's proportions, how to enable and disable various rig features, how to troubleshoot issues and much more.

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Thanks for watching and see you in the next one.