I’m well into learning rigging and animation in Blender and I just found out that Mecanim and Rigify don’t play nice together. All the discussions I’ve read about the issue (Mecanim needing specific named bones) are over a year old from when Mecnaim was just released, though. So I’m wondering if there is still an issue between the two systems?
I had the same worries, but this will help:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/BlenderAndRigify.html
Rigify and Mecanim will never be friends. The advantage of Rigify is that you can easily animate within Blender. It seems that some Unity employees don’t understand that, because if you do that: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentatio...AndRigify.html , you won’t be able to animate in Blender anymore.
It would make more sense to just use meta rig of Rigify, as the outcome is almost identical and it requires less work.
Like I said, I’m still in the learning process of animating in Blender, but considering the issues between Rigify and Mecanim, do most Blender-Unity users just rig their models manually?
One workaround that is not optimal is to create the rig with Rigify. Then, instead of weight painting the “DEF-” bones, you can mark all the “ORG-” bones to be deformable, the “DEF-” bones as non-deformable, and then weight paint the “ORG-” bones. There are a few exception for the “ORG-” bones which should not be weight painted, as they are outside of the skeletal structure.
This is a little additional work with the benefit that you can animate in Blender and use the rig with Unity’s Mechanim. If you don’t like the WGT bones in Unity, you may still use Rigify to Unity in order to eliminate them automatically when importing.
I use this to make Rigify compatible with Mecanim and it works great. Rigify to Mecanim
And I use another model where I make the animations, since this while making your rigify rig mecanim compatible, it makes you unable to animate in Blender, with that rig. But since you can use animations of any Mecanim compatible skelet, just animate in another special animations only blender file, or in a copy of the model you’re working, if having the look of it is needed while animating, and then just use those animations in Unity. 
I will never understand those approaches. Why are they generating a Rigify rig when they destroy it afterwards? This makes no sense. Instead they should directly weight paint the meta rig with the same end result and less pain.
The only reason to use the generated Rigify rig is to animate in Blender. Otherwise it makes no sense.
I FINALLY understand what you mean by this lol. I found a great tutorial that does exactly this and it makes a lot of sense. Now finally knowing what exactly Rigify does, I find it best to just use the meta rig and do everything else as you need to. Learning how it all works and building my own rig actually seems more time efficient than trying to make a system that doesn’t work work by jumping through hoops. Thanks for your input
anyone know the link to that tutorial? it’d be great to have that on this thread. Please post below.
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Since I ended up in this thread, just wanted to drop this plugin in here:
(with tutorial:
)
It does exactly what you need and as far as I can tell it works amazingly well. It lets you have both:
- Bones are removed / renamed / reparented so that Mecanim can work with the armature.
- Rigify-generated rig still works in Blender(well at least the limb IK still does, I didn’t dig around too deeply)
EDIT: okay, one thing that’s broken by the script is the Shoulder bones. They’re normally parented to ORG-shoulder and that breaks. But it’s easily fixed by adding a Copy Transforms bone constraint to DEF-shoulder.L/R, copying from shoulder.L/R