Tillsie RIG course progress
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I’ve been working through the RIG course lately, and I realized there’s a decent stretch where we build the rig, and since this isn’t a one-and-done like some exercises, I wanted to share my progress as I was working through it!
08/11/2026, weight painting!
(This isn’t the final result I swear! This is just the only screenshot I had while I was working on it.)
On this day I spent a lot of time working out the weights for the body. I did it for both the torso and the armor. (Though I didn’t take any screenshots of that, whoopsie)
It turns out weight painting is a whole discipline unto itself! A big lesson here for me is that it’s the actual deformations that matter, now how pretty the weighting looks. (I know, I know.)
08/12/2026, spine and head!
Wayne was NOT joking when he said the spine was a lot of work, but here we are! I actually adjusted the head control after the fact since it did clear the helmet, but I felt it could have been better.
08/13/2026 – Arm rigging!
I’m building out the full arm rig. Blowing it up and then attacking it piece by piece is wayyyy easier than whatever I was doing before. The intuition is also getting clearer as some patterns are showing up. I spent a solid 20 minutes figuring out what’s going on with the FK hand and the FK hand MCH, so that was fun. 😀
08/13/2026 – Arms complete!
I spent basically the entire day getting the arm rig done. Holy crap this was a lot! The script came in clutch for mirroring the drivers and the bone groups. After all of that work I really didn’t want to have to think about it all over again. XD
But here we have:
– FK arms
– IK arms– Arm tweaks
– A property bone on both sides to control the elbow pole parent, forward kinematics shoulder follow, the hand IK parent, the IK/FK switch, and the volume deformation
I had to test all of the functionality to make sure it was working, hence poor Luna being in that sorry state.
All in all I learned a TON here, and everything is kinda coming together. I still don’t think I’d be able to recite it from memory, (yet), but the reasoning behind the bone structure is pretty clear to me now.
Buuut I’m exhausted. I’ll continue with this course more tomorrow!
08/14/2026 – Palm controls!
I spent the morning knocking out the hand palm controls. I actually had a very fun time figuring out the shrinkwrap modifier for this one. I didn’t realize I had to apply it, and I didn’t realize the bone widgets addon could allow me to work in object mode, and, well, now I do! So that’s some good stuff added to my toolkit.
I think hands were just intimidating for me for a long time, so this is great! I finally have enough confidence to attack these in my own projects.
Bonus: short recording of me messing with the hands, checking the collections, and testing out their deformations.
Up next is… the fingers? I think? Should be a grand ol’ time!
08/14/2026 – Finger! (Just one)
Finally knocked out a finger! Here we’ve landed on the finger control bone that handles the finger open/close, and we _also_ have some specialized FK controls that basically act as tweak bones.Working through this really makes me want to try it on one of my own rigs and actually try out some IK fingers too! Buuuut I’m out of energy and I can save that for another day. (Also after I finish the course – gotta stay focused!)
Next up I’ll have to basically duplicate the bone and line it up with the other DEF bones for the other fingers (and thumb), and it really shouldn’t be too bad, but my brain is officially fried for the day. Gotta let myself rest!08/15/2026 – Fingers copied!
As I expected, copying the fingers over was going to be a whole thing. It also gave me a chance to come back with some fresh eyes and catch some problems. Like COMPLETELY missing the MCH parent on the palm.
Luckily, it was pretty straightforward after that. I got into the flow of it and copied everything over after a few tries. I completely forgot about the align options so that was pretty dope.
Similar to Wayne in the video, I had to adjust my widgets all over again so they could be custom for each control.
In addition, upon doing symmetrize I found out that I forgot to append .L to my names for my master controls, and for my finger tips. Easy fix, but it definitely threw me for a loop.
And hey! Now we’ve got it! Pretty happy with the result so far, though the mesh is definitely starting to go through the rounds. Looking forward to when we take a moment to fix all of the things that popped up in the course. 😀
08/18/2026 – Finally got the leg rig complete!
This was a BEHEMOTH of a lesson. Yowza. Despite everything being something I’d done before just the sheer volume made it a lot to take in. But as can be seen, we have working legs now! I kinda just barfed all of them on screen and put them in a pose, but they’re there.
Something odd that I’ve noticed is with my weight painting and a combination of the switchable parents. Depending on what parents I have set up the rig acts strangely. Not totally shocking when I think about it, but I’ve got to dig a bit more into it myself. My current assumption is that you animate certain actions with one parent and other actions with another, but it won’t make as much sense until I start battle-testing this thing.
Another one is the weight painting. I’m becoming very aware of where my previous weights may have fallen short. Luckily that’s the very next lesson, so onwards!
Also, of course, it wouldn’t be complete without a short video demo:
08/19/2026 – Luna rig COMPLETE!
I had some final loose ends to knock out, but now we’re done!
I was able to add some extra functionality to the script, and set it up to manage the subsurfs throughout the geometry. I also went ahead and added the neck follow to the rig.
I did some tweaks throughout, well, everything and troubleshooting to ensure that I didn’t have any weird deformations. Turns out I had messed up some of my DEF torso constraints earlier! Glad I went back through…
Obligatory short demo
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