Dive into Blender animation with P2 Design’s amazing new free character rigs! Perfect for practice and short films, these high-quality assets offer advanced controls, Rigify integration, and automatic corrective bones to enhance your workflow.
Are you looking to hone your animation skills in Blender without breaking the bank? Pierrick Picaut, the talent behind P2 Design, has just released four incredible, high-quality character rigs absolutely free! These “mannequin” rigs are designed to be your go-to assets for animation practice, portfolio pieces, and even short film creation.
Must Have FREE Rigs for Blender Animation by Pierrick Picaut
What’s Included and How to Get Them
The P2M library contains four distinct characters, each meticulously organized with master, geometry, and rig collections. They are built upon a customized Rigify base, ensuring robust and flexible controls.
Download Instructions: To get your hands on these fantastic rigs, simply visit the P2design Academy website. You can download them for free or choose to support Pierrick’s work with a $15 donation. Once you create an account, you’ll find the “P2M library” zipped file containing all the characters, ready for integration into your Blender asset library.
Usage Guidelines
These rigs offer great flexibility, but it’s important to understand their usage terms:
- Non-Commercial Use: Perfect for personal practice, portfolio shots, and short films. Just remember to credit P2 Design and use the hashtag #P2ES on social media when sharing your work!
- Commercial Use: Permitted for previews or “drawovers” (e.g., animating with the rig as a guide and then drawing over it), but the rigs themselves cannot be part of the final product or redistributed.
Unpacking the Rig Features
These aren’t just basic rigs; they come packed with advanced features designed to streamline your animation workflow.
Custom UI and General Controls
Each rig includes a custom UI and tools accessible via the N-panel’s “Items” tab. If the UI doesn’t load automatically, a simple script execution from the text editor will get it running.
- Rig Layers: Easily manage collection visibility and solo specific parts of the rig.
- Selection-Sensitive Properties: The main rig properties panel dynamically changes based on your selected controllers, offering relevant options.
- Visibility & Rendering: Control the visibility and renderability of character parts, including the ability to hide specific body sections for clarity.
- Color Customization: Personalize your rigs by adjusting primary and secondary colors.
- Subdivision & Smooth Corrective: Control the character’s subdivision level (set to zero during animation for performance) and toggle a smooth corrective modifier.
Advanced Body Controls
The rigs offer intuitive and detailed controls for every part of the character:
- Torso: Features a main center of gravity (CoG) controller for overall orientation, along with IK controllers for the chest and hips. Tweaker and FK bones provide granular control for nuanced posing.
- Neck & Head: Enjoy isolated rotation from the chest and dedicated tweaker bones for creating dynamic squash and stretch effects, ideal for stylized animation and smear frames. Simple facial controllers are also included for expressions.
- Arms: Benefit from FK controls that support stretching, tweaker bones for smear effects, and dedicated clavicle and shoulder controllers for natural movement. A shoulder tweaker bone allows for fine adjustments.
- Legs: Mirroring the arm functionality, the legs feature robust IK and FK chains with seamless parent switching.
- Feet: Comprehensive foot controllers enable rolling, side-to-side movement, and custom toe pivots. A slider lets you precisely shift the roll point from the ball of the foot to the toes.
- Hands & Fingers: A classic palm controller with falloff makes posing hands a breeze. Fingers default to FK chains, but you can enable tweaker controllers for individual joint adjustments and even a full IK setup with snapping capabilities. Finger rotation originates from the tip, and seamless parent switching allows fingers to be parented to any controller, crucial for simulating realistic surface contact.
Smart Corrective Bones
A standout feature is the inclusion of automatic corrective bones that address deformation issues in critical areas like the trapezius, neck base, back, knees, and elbows. While largely automatic, these can be manually tweaked for extreme poses to maintain a perfect silhouette. Hands also feature corrective bones for improved knuckle shape.The larger character includes additional corrective bones and belly bones for secondary motion, such as fat bouncing, with natural belly folds on the pelvis. The female character boasts specific corrective bones for breasts and buttocks, with breast controllers for root and tip, and automatic glute deformation triggered by leg rotation (manual adjustments possible).Finally, two custom slots are included, parented to the hands by default but switchable via Rigify, perfect for attaching props or other elements.
Further Your Animation Journey
Pierrick Picaut is not just giving away free rigs; he’s also a renowned instructor. If you’re serious about mastering Blender animation and rigging, explore his comprehensive courses:
You can also follow Pierrick for more updates and tips on X (Twitter) and Instagram.These free Blender rigs are an invaluable resource for anyone looking to practice and refine their 3D animation skills. Download them today and start bringing your characters to life!
Source:
Pierrick Picaut – Must Have FREE Rigs for Blender Animation
