I spent a day or so unwrapping both models and the better part of two weeks rigging, which was much longer than planned.

My classmate Sarah told me about rigifiy, an automatic rig addition on blender, so I activated it and shaped it to my waiter’s mesh, deleting any bones I didn’t need.

This is the final rig before generating and symmetrizing.

I went into sculpt mode and widened the mouth before adding a tongue and teeth. I duplicated these and resized them to fit the demon mesh too.

I tried to generate the rig, but an error came up saying that there wasn’t a long enough chain of bones. I hadn’t changed any of the bones and I couldn’t find anything online, so I asked the discord server. Thankfully, Alec responded.

This website recommended going to the bone properties tab and checking the ‘connected’ box was ticked, and mine wasn’t. Correcting that fixed the rig.

I then got to work assigning the eyes to the eye bones. I first watched this video:

Which taught me how to assign the eyes to the bones. This did work, but the same method didn’t apply to the teeth and tongue, so when I was looking for a new video I found this:

This said assigning mesh parts to bones can be problematic when transferring to certain gaming softwares. So I deleted the previous attempt and instead assigned the eyes, teeth and tongue to the mesh via automatic weights. This involved creating deform bones, changing the rigify type of said bones and assigning them to the right vertex groups.

Below: testing the eyes moved

I then had a problem getting the ik controls to point the knees and elbows in the right direction. In a normal, self-made rig, there’s an ik modifier which includes pole targets which fixes this very problem, but that wasn’t the case in the rigify rig.

1:15-2:42 of this video helped me with this by 1) recommending that I shift the elbow and knee joint bones in the direction they are supposed to bend (which fixed the arms) and 2) recommending that I go to edit mode > select the upper thigh bone > bone options > rigify type > rotation axis > X manual. This means that the knees only bend on the X axis.

Fixed ik legs:

Fixed ik arms:

My next problem was the mesh splitting at the belt.

I found out that the belt verts had become disconnected from main mesh, so I reconnected them all manually.

I then repainted the weight in the weight paint mode to stop stretching.

All fixed!

Then came the horns, which where moving with the face. I wiped them off every deform bone until no part of them moved.

But then this happened:

So I went to the ear bone, which was a bone I didn’t think I’d have to use often, and painted half the head in, repeating on the other side.

This fixed the problem.

Lastly, I had had issues with the apron on previous failed rigs. I had joined its’ mesh to the main mesh, but it only connected to one bone, so when I moved the chest, the whole apron moved stiffly, clipping through the legs. I decided to try a different route and attach the separate apron mesh to the rig with automatic weights, as I had with the tongue. It worked!

However, the underside of the apron had attached itself to the hand ik controls.

After some fixes in weight paint mode, I was all done!