BONUS: With this purchase you will also receive 20% off your first 3 months of Blender education at cgcookie.com. Details in the download files

What is Auto-Rig Pro?

Auto-Rig Pro is an addon for Blender to rig characters, retarget animations, and provide Fbx/Gltf export, with settings 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!

Tip: If you want to be notified when a new version is released, then consent to receive emails from creators.

Want to try first? Download Mike, free character rig here.

Rig features demo

Useful links:
Documentation - Learn here!
Frequently Asked Questions
Youtube Channel - Tutorials and demos
Twitter - Follow development
Joris' Rig Library for Auto-Rig Pro - 24 animated rig presets
Quick Rig - Turn a skeleton into Auto-Rig Pro control rig

Rig fast with the Smart feature

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.

If you encounter any bugs please report it. Updates are free and will remain free. Also make sure to read the FAQ and the documentation to solve common issues.

Modular - Fully Featured

Customize the rig definition in a few clicks: fingers, wings, toes, spine bones, multiple neck bones, tail, breasts, ears and much more. Duplicate or remove limbs to rig spiders, centaurs... or whatever!

Video tutorial, rig a centaur with the multi-limb feature: Centaur Rig

Wings limb for advanced feathers rig: 

Kilt limb to rig kilt, dresses, skirt-like clothes

Spline IK limb to rig ropes, tentacles, IK spine...

3 bones IK for quadrupedal creatures:

Fingers and Toes IK-FK:

Intuitive tool to edit the bone shapes, with automatic mirror:

Customizable UI: fully editable layout, buttons positions, colors, background pictures... The picker panel dynamically updates, so you can select any bone from the separate panel easily.

Remap

The Remap feature allows retargetting of any armature action to another one, with different bone names and bone orientations, supporting imported .bvh/.fbx armatures for example. It's universal: works with Auto-Rig Pro, Rigify, custom rigs... Define the source armature, the target armature, and the animation will retarget according to the bones names matches and bones original orientation.

It support IK feet, hands for accurate motion tracking, and an interactive offset tool to remap to different characters proportions.

Video: Remapper demo

Game Engine Export

Skeleton export to FBX/GLTF format.  Complies with Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot...

Export Types:
Universal to export the skeleton of any creatures
Humanoid for bipeds only, with options for easy retargetting and root motion in game engines

• Support of multiple twist bones for optimal volume preservation in game engines, where dual quaternions skinning is not possible (top: single twist bone, below: 4 twist bones)

• Unit conversion to initialize the scale transforms values to 1.0 in Unity and Unreal Engine
• Unreal Mannequin compliant: support Mannequin bones hierarchy, bone axes conversion, bones naming for UE4/UE5
  
• Automatic A-Pose
• Support full facial rig, and advanced bones. "Twist" mode for secondary controllers, wrapped on bendy-bones for smooth curves effects, leading to 1:1 export compatibility in Fbx format

• "Soft-Linking" for cheap stretchy bone effect, Fbx compliant
• Actions are baked to the simplified rig
• Animated shape keys (blend shapes) support
• Selective/multiple action export
• Root motion support

Bring your poses to the next level!

The Secondary Controllers offer a unique control over the pose. Located all along the limbs, they're dedicated to fine pose sculpting, cartoon effects, bending, stretching, etc. Three deformations mode in option: Twist (exportable to Fbx and bendy-bones based for best compatibility), Additive (exportable to FBX), Bendy-Bones (Blender only).

Just use them instead of corrective shape keys, or as a complement. Below a typical leg bent before and after tweaking the secondary controllers.

Corrective Shape Keys can be created easily with a dedicated tool supporting IK-FK bone chains:

Joints Fans are helper bones in option, allowing correct volume preservation in tricky areas such as elbow, wrist, thigh, knee, even if "Preserve Volume" skinning (Dual Quaternions) is disabled.

ChildOf Constraints Switcher

Easily switch and snap from one ChildOf constraint to another with the automatic ChildOf switcher (universal tool, compatible with any rig)

Rig Layers

Store bones, armature layers, objects and collection in custom rig layers to easily manage the character features: hide or show clothes, hair, bones controller...

Built to Last

Blender is constantly improving and updating, and so is Auto-Rig Pro. But even though upgrades are nice, we don't want to miss the old rigs because of compatibility issues with newer versions. That's why backward-compatibility is always ensured at all costs, even if it involves a lot of maintenance on the code side. A legacy menu takes care of preserving features from the past. And if necessary, an "Update" button will upgrade the rigs automatically to the latest requirements, no loss!

Tell Me More!

Extensive list of what the addon has to offer:

• Automatic bone placement solver based on mesh recognition for bipeds characters. Asymmetrical models supported.
• Edit Reference Bones feature to modify the rig anytime you want. No need to redo everything if a bone is not where you want it to be.
• Apply Pose as Rest Pose feature to quickly change the rest pose of the character, aligning reference bones on it and applying armature modifiers in a single click
• Modular: only rig what you need. Fingers, toes, ears, breast, adjustable amount of spine, neck, twist bones, tail, and neck bones... Duplicate, remove limbs to rig creatures with multiple arms and legs.
• Fingers auto-rotation option: bend when scaling the first phalange, pre-defined fist pose
• Easy controller shape edition
• Bone picker: Can be turned on/off, import/export presets. Customizable.
• Colors customization
• Cartoon compliant: stretchy spine, legs, arms...
• IK-FK snap autokey compliant, snaps properly when unlocking all the leg/forearm rotation axis
• IK-FK controllers auto hide
• Hybrid IK pole / IK arrow vector
• 2 or 3 bones IK chains for legs
• Knees and elbows pinning
• Head rotation locked or free
• Bend all fingers in one click (fingers grasp), fist pre-defined pose, auto rotation of fingers phalanges from scale
• IK/FK eyes
• Auto-eyelid rotation
• Multiple Child-Of constraints support for the IK hands and feet to change their parent space any time (e.g. if the character is driving a car, hands on the wheel, then grab the car door)
• Complete set of secondary controllers for fine pose sculpt
• Advanced facial setup with automated placement
• Improved skinning based on Blender's heatmaps. Auto-splitting of multiple elements + voxelization. Compliant with the Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning addon.
• Shape keys drivers creation tool
• Game engines support, FBX, GLTF: Unity - Unreal Engine - Godot. Generic, Humanoid and Universal rig type
• Bone remapper to retarget any armature action to another one, with different bone names and bone orientations. IK support. BVH, FBX files compliant, e.g. Mixamo animations.
• Compliant with X-Muscle System for realistic muscles simulation
• By buying this addon you support my work and the Blender foundation, its developers financially. A part of each sale is donated to them. It's worth a big thank you from the open source community, helping Blender remaining free and accessible for everyone! And obviously you ensure the funds for this addon next new features, bugfix. I'm making my best to constantly improve the beast, based on users requests and my own ideas. Have quick look at the release log below. You receive a notification when the addon is updated, and download it for free.

 

Users Cases:

Auto-Rig Pro is actively used in the film and video-game industry.
Games:
Eternight
Fabledom
Manor Lords
Usurpator
Trail of Nanook
Escape Legacy: Ancient Scrolls

Films, TV Series:
Magic Campers
Gus
Team Dronix
Pachyderme
CoopTroop

Updates:

Make sure to uninstall the current addon before installing the new one and restart blender.

--[3.71.16]--

New/improved:

• Rig: New 3 Bones Leg Type 2 setting (old default one is Type 1). This is a complete revised version of the 3 bones leg, with an IK rotation controller at the calf joint, and extra stretch controller for the upper thigh.
• Rig: "_bend" secondary controllers are now white color by default
  
• Rig: "Set Character Name" now also renames the cs_grp empty object
  
• Rig: Edit Ref Bones/Match to Rig now preserve the visibility of user-added collections
  
• Rig: Multiple Spine limbs are now supported
  
• Rig: Kilt limbs support in "Apply Pose as Rest Pose"
  
• Rig: Facial: New "Linear Y" and "Linear Z" settings in Limb Options, to better define for each axis the shape of the lips when moving the corner controller (was a single value driving all axes before). Plus, to fine-tweak the result, individual custom properties located on the lips reference bones can be adjusted: "linear_Y" and "linear_Z".
  
• Rig: Facial: The "Linear (Corners)" and "Linear (Jaw)" parameters in Limb Options now support negative values, allowing even more curved interpolation
  
• Rig: Facial: New "Soft" setting for eyebrows. This allows to deform smoothly the eybrows when moving the c_eyebrow_full "controller".
  
• Rig: Facial: New "Masters" setting for eyebrows. This adds 2 master controllers at the root and tip of the eyebrow, to adjust the global shape of the eyebrow quickly
  
• Rig: UI: Since the facial Limb Options panel was getting over-populated, it has been redesigned with tabs to display Eyes, Mouth, and Others settings only.
• Rig: New "IK Pole Height" setting for 3 Bones Legs. Setting it to 0.0 allows backward-compat. with older versions
  
• Skin: Shape Keys can now be evaluated in their current state when binding
  
• Remap: New Heat preset
  
• Export: New actions are now exportable by default
• Export: "Custom Export Scripts" can now be embedded in the Blender file (text editor)
  
• Preferences: The default paths of custom Armatures, Limbs, Rig Layers... are now set to User/Documents/AutoRigPro
  
• Picker: Major speed improvement when selecting a picker bone. There was overhead in the bone selection/ armature collection management, it has been refactored. Selecting a bone from the picker is now almost instant, while it could take up to one second before.
  

Fixed:

• Rig: "Apply Pose as Rest Pose" was missing support for Bendy-Bones limbs
  
• Rig: Missing toes activation in Limb Options when adding a leg limb
  
• Rig: Missing constraints removal when unsetting "Spine Master Controller"
• Rig: Error when disabling eyebrows
  
• Smart: Error when a 2-spine bones armature was already existing in the scene
• Export: The spine bones amount was not evaluated properly when exporting as a humanoid, since the spine limb is now a duplicable limb
• Export: UE: The "joints fans" were preventing to export a valid hierarchy when enabling Mannequin Axes
• Export: Error when exporting spine limbs in Universal mode
  

> Older Releases Logs