Snow & Rain Updated

Rain's character rig was made all the way back in 2019, and Snow in not-so-recent 2022. As both Blender and CloudRig rapidly change, things can't always be versioned perfectly, plus, as I gain more experience, I might do things a bit differently over time as well. So, these old character rigs were in need of a facelift, and several users have been asking for it. These rigs should now work on versions 4.1 and greater.

Download

You can download them for free from our Character Library, they've been bumped to the top.

What's changed?

Bone Collections

The most obvious aspect is that Bone Layers and Bone Groups no longer exist, so both rigs were completely re-organized with Bone Collections. The visibility of these can also be driven, which I used to hide IK and FK controls depending on which ones are currently active, which should reduce visual clutter and make the rigs even more beginner-friendly.

Furthermore, a UI reminiscent of the old grid layout returns. This can even be customized if you have CloudRig installed.

You can also press Shift+M, just like in the old days, to bring up a pop-up panel of collections. But in this case, you will get the full nested list of collections, not the simple grid layout.

Snow's Metarig

Snow's metarig has been updated to the "new" standalone CloudRig extension, so it can be generated again, and it can be a useful resource to try and reverse engineer if you want to learn how to use CloudRig.

CloudRig UI

Rain wasn't rigged with CloudRig, since back in 2019 it didn't exist. However, she was eventually updated to use its rig script, providing functionality like IK/FK snapping and baking, which has also gotten more precise and reliable in newer versions. This relies on certain data being stored on the rig. With the recent improvements, the format of this data has completely changed. So, to make use of the improved functionality, I had to manually convert all her UI data, which is normally not really intended to be readable by humans, nevermind editable. But since I'm the one that implemented the data structure, I was able to do this with minimal hassle. If you have CloudRig installed, this UI is also editable without any coding.

Bone Colors

I'm an advocate for removing custom bone colors from Blender, and instead improving the built-in base 20 color presets that exist, 5 of which are currently pure black and most of them too dark to be useful. For that reason, I've been using my own custom set of 20 color presets, which were designed here. These are now built into CloudRig. These rigs now use these colors, as a proof of concept. My hope is that this can contribute to or inspire improvements to the bone color system in core Blender.

Animation compatibility

I don't guarantee compatibility of old animations on the updated rigs, especially Snow. You can always try, but you're probably better off finishing old projects on the Blender version that you started on.