What is Auto-Rig Pro?

Auto-Rig Pro is an addon for Blender to rig characters, retarget animations, and provide Fbx/Gltf export, with presets for Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot. First developed as my own in-house rigging tool, i’ve released it a few years ago and it expanded quickly thanks to great support from the community!For humanoid characters, the Smart feature can automatically place the bones to speed up the process, after adding the green markers. The result remains editable.

Non-humanoid characters can also be rigged without the Smart feature, manually (horse, dog…).

Based on a non-destructive workflow, the final rig remains easily editable anytime after its generation. Check the product documentation and the youtube channel for more informations.

Built for performances, allowing fast animation playback.

Character examples: Mike (free), Anna, Kevin, Nina and Alex

Important note about skinning: If possible, use water-tight geometry for best auto-skinning results. Knowing the bases of Blender’s skinning tools, weight painting, to fine tweak the bones influences is recommended. Read the doc for more informations.

[3.73.39]

New/improved:
Compatibility: Blender 4.3: FBX export
Export: New “Actions Linker” menu, to link an action to another one. Useful if exporting RigA animation, that depends on RigB through constraints (such as two characters holding each other’s hands).\nIf animations are interdependent, it is necessary to declare these links for correct animation export.
Export: New “One File per Actions List” setting, when enabling both “As Multiple Files” and “Actions Manager”. This allows to export one file per Action List, including all actions in the list.
Export: Godot: New setting to comply with Godot Root Motion axes
Export Godot: Removed the “Root Motion” setting that bakes the c_traj animation to armature object, not relevant for Godot Root Motion.
Export: Actions Lists: Filtered actions in the actions selector, so that actions that are already part of the current list are removed from the search list
Export: GLTF: Exposed the “Start from frame 0” setting, in order to force the first frame of each action to be zero if enabled
Export: UE: Removed the extra orientation tweaks applied to the spine bones when exporting with Mannequin axes. It was offsetting the angles by a few degrees to improve the match in case of straight spine bones, but can be misleading. It is best to align the spine bones manually. It can still be enabled in the “Legacy” menu though.
Export: Actions Manager: New “Batch” feature to add multiple actions at once to a list, with filtering
Export: UI: Added the “Rename Bones from File” checkbox in the properties panel too. Was confusing to have it only in the menu located in file export browser
Export: Avoid operator when removing shape keys for faster performances
Rig: Spline IK: Changed “Parent External Bone to” setting, was limited to the tip bone before. Now applies to all bones of the chain, and to Deforming or Twist bones instead of controllers. Can still be parented to controllers if necessary, by directly parenting Spline reference bones to them.
Rig: Spline IK: New “Add Tail Bone” option. This adds an extra bone at the tip of the chain, that is not part of the main IK chain. Useful when needing to parent other limb to the tip, that must not be stretched or rotated with the main chain, such as rigging a spine for quadrupeds.
Rig: Spline IK: New “Preserve Shape” option, to preserve the current shape when changing the amount of the spline bones.
Rig: Spine: New “Preserve Shape” option, to preserve the current spine shape when changing the amount of bones
Rig: Leg: New Limb Option to skip the foot IK offset alignment when Match to Rig, allowing custom positioning
Rig: Spine: New “Parent Fallback” parameter in Limb Options, to set the default spine parent in case the root reference bone is not parented. By default parented to “c_traj”. No parent if set to None.
Rig: Tail: New “Preserve Shape” option, to preserve the current shape when changing the amount of the tail bones
Rig: Spine, Tail, Spline IK: Removed “Update Transform” option, was confusing. Now, automatically update the bones transforms if the count was changed, using grid align or preserve shape if enabled.
Rig: New Bulge setting for arm Joint Fans, allowing to add extra bulge deformation when the fans are spreading/folding. The created constraint can be manually edited afterwards.
Rig: Apply Pose as Rest Pose: New “Apply Deformed Shape Keys” toggle, can be useful to speed up baking time in case deformations are not affecting shape keys
Rig: New Bulge setting for leg Joints Fans too
Rig: New Ankle Joints Fans
Rig: Leg: New “Foot Roll Break” option. If enabled, the foot will start rotating from the ball, then from the tip toes, when moving the foot roll cursor. Settings can be found in “Rig Main Properties”.
Skin: Warning message in case of negative mesh scale when binding
Picker: The picker camera is now set automatically when clicking “Add Picker”
Picker: Support reverse spine bones
Rig Tools: New “Extract Root Motion” function that tracks and bakes the “c_traj” controller to the pelvis position, while maintaining it on the floor, and preserving the rig animation
Rig Tools: Extract Root Motion now supports Location Z with initial offset applied
Rig Tools: Improved Extract Root Motion performances, around 4x faster (before: 24 sec for 400 frames, after: 6 sec)
Rig Tools: Extract Root Motion: Added X and Y offsets
Remap: Added “Extract Root Motion” as an option when retargetting
Smart: Facial features are now togglable: Eyebrows, Eyes, Ears, Nose, Lips, Tongue, Teeth, Chin
Smart: Auto filter mesh objects when clicking “Get Selected Objects”. This avoids throwing an error if non-mesh objects are selected.
Smart: UI: Moved the “Fingers” checkbox in the header of the Fingers tab to minimize redundancy

Fixed:
Rig: The horse rig was containing unwanted actions data leftovers
Rig: Removed the “body_mid” collections coming from old armature presets
Rig: Facial: Error when disabling the mouth bones
Rig: Bottom bones had accidentally their Deform property turned off
Rig: Apply Pose as Rest Pose crashing in case of numerous shape keys
Rig: The Tail limb could have incorrect parent. No uses the default parent_retarget function
Rig: The Dog preset had a “Connected” second spine bone, leading ot issue
Rig: Thigh Joint Fans incorrectly parented to 3 Bones Leg Type 2
Rig: Custom shapes of reversed spine controllers could be offset
Rig: Kilt: When changing the amount of bones, the Z axis could be incorrectly oriented. Now calculates the curve normal vectors to align Z axes on.
Rig: Changed the arm, leg Stretch-Length minimum value to 0.1
Rig: Fixed the new Ankle Joint Fans bulge, was not evaluating the foot angle correctly, new helper foot bone added
Rig: Apply Pose as Rest Pose: Arm and leg stretch controller was not supported
Rig: Error when setting up secondary bones color group in pre-Blender 4 versions
Rig: Disabled “Extrapolate” from the c_foot_heel bone and cleared out of range mapping to avoid accidental rotation flip
Skin: Error when restoring current vertices weights if a temp object was deleted (Apply Shape Keys)
Export: Skinned objects having same name as export skeleton were clashing. It now throws a warning before exporting.
Export: Add batch actions to Action Manager could generate an error if an action was removed from file
Export: GLTF: Disabled the “export_apply” argument from the actual export, was preventing shape keys to export. Modifiers are pre-applied by AutoRigPro functions anyway, so no changes on the user side.
Export: Error when exporting actions list containing removed actions
Export: The exported skeleton was incorrectly named with an “_arpbob” suffix when the rig export name was the same as the armature name
Export: Apply Shape Keys was failing if the basis shape key was not named “Basis”. Now, always refer to the shape key at index 0 as Basis
Export: Humanoid: Invalid fingers export when exporting more than 2 arms
Export: Shape keys could not apply and export correctly under certain circumstances, was missing “from_mix” set to false
Export: GLTF: Apply Modifiers was failing
Rig Tools: Extract Root Motion quat_prev error
Smart: The arm/leg reference bones roll was not calculated. Was expecting the Match to Rig function to do it, but now that “Auto IK Roll” can be disabled, the roll must be aligned