Python post again about the rigify utility (Patreon)

I've been working on the final feature for my rigify utility that helps with custom constraints which was adding drivers.

It was a bit of a challenge but I successfully got writing and reading drivers from a text file working. You should be able to have any driver on any property on any constraint on your generated rig.

I don't know how many people used tons of variables in their drivers for the rigs but if I was going to make that other people might use, I wanted to have 100% driver coverage. So you *should* be able to use any number of variables in your driver.

"Why go through all this trouble when rigify has that hard to use relink constraints feature, Velocirection? Doesn't that do the same thing?"

First of all, my main reasoning is because "relink constraints" is hard to use. There's barely any information about anywhere on the internet or in the rigify documentation itself. I use a lot of constraints to make setups like this and it would be a *pain* to keep adding constraints to the rig every time I made a change to the metarig and regenerated it to test it.

With the downsides of adding constraints to the generated rig gone, it allows the user so much more freedom for customizing their rigs generated with rigify.

You get the power of rigify's fantastic rig samples, the power of freedom to add more customization to your generated rig and the power to iterate on your metarig without worrying about losing constraints.

Right now it's 100%-ish functional for how it fits into my workflow. For a public-ish release, it needs some more time in the oven. I'll attach a zip with a blend file and the necessary stuff in an example if you want to try it out (and maybe use it on your own rigify rig? Just save a copy of your file before doing anything, just in case). This quick video... "tutorial" shows how to use it (for the actual release I'll do a more in-depth, voiced explainer)

https://youtu.be/yr-sbJFH-R8?si=upujnATtTkHdU2pH

This is not an add-on (yet) so the zip won't install anything if you try to install it as an add-on. To get the panel, run the '_UI' script. 

If you want to use this in a different file, it's a bit complicated (for now) because you'll need to append in the "_UI" script in the file (to get the add-on UI back after you close blender) and also make sure the "rigify_utility_messyscript.py" is in the same directory as the file your working on. If you don't want to mess with all that, I should have a real add-on for this ready soon.

This useful-for-me-maybe-not-anyone-else add-on I made for myself is a character collection setup utility. This will create a collection for a character and all the collections I always use for a character.

Basically, all this does is create a collection with collections inside of it for things like the body mesh, viewport mesh, jiggle objects if needed, etc...

For me, this is a lot nicer to have setup before working on a character. Like it's easier for me to stay organized when I have places for stuff to go made already vs. making collections for stuff as I go.

If that sounds useful to you, let me know and I'll share it too!