I recently decided to try out a rigging thing for Blender called Rigify, which lets you, well, rig up a character with a very technical rig. I’ve known about it for a while, but I shied away from it as I felt a little intimidated by it. But, in my interest to be more invested with Blender, I gave it a chance. Naturally I used my character, Rita Gear, to show it off.

Rigify comes with premade rigs, mostly human, but also some animals as well (and a shark rig, for some reason…). Naturally, I used the human and the cat rigs. But unfortunately, Rigify isn’t particularly modulated. That is to say, you can’t take bits from one rig, and combine it with another. At least now automatically, I had to do it manually, which took some effort since I didn’t know very much what I was doing.

I ended up using the human body, with the cat's tail. I also used the cat's face for Rita, since it seemed obvious. Though, as a side effect it gave her a kind of triangular effect with her mouth. Granted it might've happened anyway with the human face, I'm not sure. Initially I was put off by it, but it's starting to grow on me, make her more unique in her own right.

I was initially planning on animating her, but all the work to correct the rig and the skinning left me pretty burnt out, so I settled for rendering a few poses. But I do hope to show off her animated soonest.