Ive just finished rigging a character with rigify in Blender 2.79 and after downloading 2.79 just last night, I really wished I had used 2.78 to rig him as there seem to have been a lot of changes to Rigify in 2.79 and I personally am really not liking it.
Now im no pro, so maybe these changes are for the best, but I wanted to share my thoughts here to see what everyone else who uses rigify thought. The metarig I added in BLENDER 2.79 is highlighted below so there is no confusion :
Ok , so ive only just started playing about with the rig after auto-weighting it to my character, and here of some of the things that bother me , I would appreciate anybodys views on these issues :
1. There is nolonger a head and neck bone in the metarig, well there IS , but they are now named spine.004 , Spine.005 and Spine.006 respectively . Last time I checked, my head was called a head , because it is a head :P , call a fork a fork and all that....... if you ask me , thats just confusing for no reason , or is there a reason ?
2. The foot on the metarig has changed , not sure why. But heel.01 bone is nolonger needed it seems, but heel.02 is still there , aptly called heel.02 still , just to confuse you more.....as there is no 01 as far as I can see....
3. We seem to have lost the really handy (pardon the pun) scalable bones for opening and closing the fingers.... I personally found this very efficient when animating, but alas they have vanished..... Now the only similar way to achieve this that I can see, is to select each finger bone one by one and rotate all on local X axis with individual origins - which seems very convoluted , and really fun for tweaking in the graph editor.....
4. EVERY bone on the rig (and controls) are set to quaternion rotations with all axis unlocked... Now surely , since bones such as the fingers, elbows and knees only rotate on a single axis unless you are in a very painful accident, then surely it would make sense to have these as euler rotations with Z and Y axis locked?
Maybe im wrong, maybe this is not Rigify and just some new addition to Blender that I was unaware of, , maybe the changes are great and for good reason, and im just being very ignorant. If so , then I apologise for my moan, but in my view, the one in 2.78 was great and these changes just seem silly.
I would appreciate any input to see what others think, Thanks in advance :)
They changed the default metarigs to use the pitchipoy rig type versions. I have not looked at 2.79 so I am not sure if the original rig types are available anymore. That is why you are seeing major differences. I sure hope the original rig types were not scrapped in the transition. That would be a huge loss and would make no sense to me. I would have to mount a revolt. :)
I've been waiting for 2.79 to go live before messing with it. It looks like they have release candidate 2 out. Hopefully 2.79 official will be live soon.
Something you can try is to select the metarig , enter pose mode, then look to see what rig types are assigned and available to the different bones of the metarig.
Good luck!
Edit: Just had a quick play with 2.79. In user preferences, rigify addon has a toggle to enable the old 2.76a feature set. So when it's checked it will work exactly as it did. Then you will have the ability to use the original or pitchipoy versions again. I am not liking that they are trying to phase out the original rig types. That seems insane to me and lessens the choices for riggers. I use both and mix and match them often and in different combos for nearly every creature and character I make based on my needs for that creature/character. Hmmmm!!!!!!
Thanks a lot Dan :) , please let me know how you find it when you get around to trying out 2.79