Rigify or Auto rig pro or voxel heat skinning addon, Which one is best for rigging ?

I tried auto rig pro & Voxel heat skinning addon they are better tools then rigify automatic weighting. Can you share your opinion which is best to use and good for learning for future.

  • Wayne Dixon replied

    Hi Cadzet.
    I have tried all 3. 

    Here are my thoughts.


    Voxel Heat:

    There are different methods of automatically weighting, and each method has strengths and weaknesses in different situations.
    You've probably seen this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoKwjvuXb9I)
    Most of the time (98%) I either use manual weighting or automatic weights as a starting point.

    There have only been a few situations that I have used the voxel heat.
    But if I used it more often, I would better know when it would speed me up.  At the moment because I use it so infrequently, I'm just using that as almost a last resort.


    Auto Rig Pro:

    I've only used this twice.  And the last time I used it I was on a really tight deadline - I tried it, it didn't work the way I needed it to out of the box and I didn't have the time to figure out what I needed to do in order to get it to do what I needed.  

    It seems good - but there are drawbacks to using something that is only developed by 1 person (Artell).
    There are less tutorials, and a single point of failure.  If Artell no longer wants to develop it, then it can just stop working when Blender gets a breaking update.


    Rigify:

    For a very long time, I really didn't like the rig that rigify produced.  However, in recent years the development (of many people) have made rigify excellent.  I still don't like 

    The advantages of Rigify is that it is a core module of Blender so it will continue to be developed along with Blender (even if the developers change).  There are also many tutorials on how to use it (you should check out https://blendermarket.com/products/rig-anything-with-rigify  (I think Todor has also made it free on YT but if you can support him, that's a good thing to do)

    It's also possible to code and add your own stuff to Rigify (but VERY advanced).
    This is something I have started doing recently.  I didn't like the way some parts were generated so I've started rewriting parts on my own system that can plug in to rigify w/o breaking or touching any of the core rigify code.  

    Maybe it's possible to do this with ARP but for me, I'm spending that time on the system that has more security.


    TL;DR

    Learn as much as you can, the more you know, the more valuable your skills are.  Personally I prefer Rigify over ARP (for the reasons mentioned above)