Game Rig Tools Addon
If you work with Blender and Game Engines, I think you’re going to love our new addon: Game Rig Tools addon (GRT).
What is Game Rig Tools?
As the name suggests, this addon is a collection of tools that helps when rigging characters for export to Game Engines. It is based on the CGDive workflows for game-ready rigs which I shared on youtube. These techniques are versatile: they can prepare any Blender rig for export to any game engine (Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc). The only problem was that they were manual. But thanks to Game Rig Tools, the whole process is now automated.
Main Features
So what can GRT do for you? The two main features are:
- quickly extract a game rig based on a control rig
- bake animations from the control rig to the extracted game rig
Game Rig Extraction
Blender allows us to build complex control rigs (aka animation rigs), featuring IK/FK switching, limb stretching, etc. However such rigs are not suitable for export to a Game Engine. If they work at all, they’ll result in unnecessary exported bones and a bad hierarchy. This means that your game rig may not be optimized or may not perform as you expect.
This is why I researched and devised techniques that allow us to turn any control rig into a game-ready armature. The game bones can be part of the control rig, but splitting them into a separate rig makes it easier to manage and export.
Therefore, one of the main features of Game Rig Tools is rig extraction. You just need a control rig (it couple be your custom rig or Rigify or any Blender rig). With a few clicks, the addon will extract the Deform bones into a separate armature, clean it up from unnecessary data and constrain the game bones to the control rig. We offer powerful default settings but also give you the ability to change or disable any of the processes that the addon performs.
Action Baking
As good as the two rig system is (control rig and game rig), it has one drawback. Animations need to be baked to the game rig before they can be exported out. The baking process is not difficult but if you have tens or even hundreds of animations, it can become very time-consuming.
That’s why we made the “Action Bakery” a part of the addon. Using this feature you can bake any number of actions with just a few clicks.
How much does GRT cost?
We want the addon to be available to everyone so we release it as a “pay-what-you-want” product. We ask people who can afford it to support us by paying around $15.
