BlenRig 4.0 adds automatic skinning to Blender
Argentinian artist Juan Pablo Bouza has released version 4.0 of his BlenRig automatic rigging and skinning system for Blender 2.5x.
BlenRig, which has evolved over four years from a single humanoid rig to a fully adjustable system that can be tailored to any biped character, consists of an armature and mesh deform cage, enabling artists to skin characters with little or no weight painting.
BlenRig uses only Blender’s standard constraints, although there is an optional additional GUI. The rig offers a choice of FK, IK, hinge and stretchy controls, which can be mixed and matched to individual body parts.
Bouza is offering three characters rigged with BlenRig as free downloads from his website, with the BlenRig GUI included in the zip archives.
The site also includes five video tutorials explaining how to use the current release. We thought this one, showing how to reshape a previously rigged character into a new figure, was particularly cool.