[Blender] Auto-rig Pro VS Rigify

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*CHAPTERS*
0:00 Auto Rig Pro VS Rigify
1:45 Rig Types
4:45 Generated Rig
5:30 Meta Rig/ Reference Bones
6:20 Customization
7:55 User Experience
9:35 De Facto Standard
10:51 Additional Tools
11:52 Final Score
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[jorisvanlaar]

I worked with both and prefer Auto-Rig Pro because:
- It's actively being developed (in contrary to Rigify)
- More robust
- Better user experience
- Additional tools (retargeting etc)
- Active and helpful support by the developer

[RinKin]

Auto-rig is European teacher, that can be strict at times, but overall pretty loyal to you.
Yes, you have to pay for his time.

Rigify is Asian martial arts sensei. He wont consider your weaknesses, wont prize you, he is harsh and rough.
Heck he can even break your bones. *wink wink*
But you can come to him at any time having only your clothes on and tell - "teach me sensei", and depending on your willingness to learn, he will.

[dmitrypavlov]

I've found most powerfull tool to customize rigify rigs is ability to edit final rig with post-generation script, where you can customize almost any feature, tweak bones settings, add new constraints to generated bones etc. I even managed to add some ragdoll feature to rigify rig, once your system is set up, you can easily transfer your metarig to almost any character to different proportions and all your features will smoothly be transfered to new rig.

[thiago]

Rigify > autorig
if you leave laziness and study/read the manual.
custom rigs can be made without any problems and saved as blocks to use in other projects if you really know how to use rigify.

[GamerReality]

As a game designer simply wanting to rig a character, this was a helpful comparison video that saved me time!

[doublea]

As an avid rigify user, I don't think there will ever be a point where I'd switch to ARP. I understand that it does much to increase it's usability especially for beginner/intermediate users, but I could never leave behind the amount of customization available to me with rigify. The modularity and way in which rig types interact makes for very quick prototyping, if there is a type lacking in functionality or completely missing this can be rectified by adding a feature set written by someone else or myself, and I can run post generation scripts for finishing touches. While ARP aims to be a paid, efficient, and easy to use rigging tool, rigify leans more towards being an open source platform used for rig generation. My only gripe with it being that they should maybe put a little bit more effort in documenting and explaining of both the types already there and the underlying python libraries used during generation.

The skin and face types added with 3.0 are also quite powerful and super fun to work with (and despite being out for a while now I've not yet found anyone on YouTube with a good comprehensive video about them 🙂)

[tcatking]

idk man I think this battle was rigged...

[forestlong]

Well, ARPro also has a lot of vague bugs and developers don't always respond adequately to bug reports. I have already encountered this. For example, last year they never gave me a clear answer why the poles of the knees did not stand up straight by default. They were very indignant at my request on Twitter. The automatic nature of AutorigPro limits the freedom to edit a rig. Everything is done through the internal menus and modules of this addon, which is not very convenient.
For a very long time I could not figure out how the clenching into a fist is done, because the description of this procedure was not complete. I stopped using ARP and continued to study Rigify. Which gave me a deeper understanding of how the rig works.

[deepelements]

As a 3d artist for me Autorig pro is the best rigging system I've ever used and it's so easy. I can spend more time and art now :)

[forestlong]

I would like to give you a theme for the video. In Blender, there is almost no rig of long-skirted clothes. Skirts, raincoats, aprons. What is the problem with Blender? A full-fledged Rig of such clothes is almost 99% replaced by a simulation. But in Maya this is not a problem, and in Blender I saw only one single video on rigging a skirt by Pierrick Picot, and then he voiced only half of the problem.

[Sy_xxwhiterose]

In experience in asset production, Rigify works better if you want to add extra custom bones, custom face rigs and the like. It's the same speed of set up when you get fluent with it. It also lets you save the custom rig types easier than ARP. And, Rigify is universal. I've had issues if rigs not working when other users don't have arp.

I also used ARP, but I found that its lacking in tutorials and help when it comes to bug fixes. A lot of errors (weird finger targeting) had no help readily available. I also felt like the documentation is a bit awkward with customisation, but that's just me.

Both are good, but I'll stay with Rigify for now.

[infotoons]

I use both of them. I like ARP for the face out-of-the-box (although the new superface for Rigify in 3.0 and up is pretty good now that you can generate more bones for the lips) but I seemed to get better results for the body out of Rigify. ARP is hands-down the fastest if you're just setting up a model for a one-time-use.
I'll generally have my models rigged in ARP, Rigify and Mixamo. Sometimes a combination of mixamo and rigify's superface thanks to information from a certain YouTuber going by the handle CGDive.

[scardario]

I used to love rigify, I still think it's really great if you don't need to export your work. The exported rigify armature is a mess, while ARP is super clean, specially if you want to use it in a game engine. As an additional point, I think is important to point out that ARP team is constantly fixing bugs and adding features, while rigify has been more or less in the same state for some time now, which is so sad, there's so much potential in there.

[stivosaurus]

The video we have all been waiting for! Thanks for doing the comparison.

[henkkok]

Thank you, quite a useful exploration. From my own experience rigging 10+ characters for feature film with rigify and 7 characters for episodic content, I prefered working with autorig pro. Both tools get the job done. To me, clear error messages, proper support, and extended workflow tools for mocap, retargeting weigh in very heavily in favor of autorig pro. At least in 2022 this holds true for me.

That said, who knows what the future holds…

[fnafgamer]

As an ARP user, here’s some things I’d like to touch on from experience.

ARP has worse errors than Rigify in my opinion. I’ve had problems where the arms and legs (in IK mode) would for no reason stop working. I found out how to fix it, but not what causes it. This happened with all the characters I’ve made so far. I even had a bug report where the left arm on one of my characters broke when appended to 4.0 but not in 3.6. It just seems to do this randomly and idk why. I fixed it by going on the ‘nostr’ bones and deleting the driver on the IK constraint.

The bone colors for ARP characters also seem to broke in 4.0. The left side of the rig (with the orange colored bones) would for some reason be invisible until you select them (outside of the the ones with bone shapes). The bones would thankfully go back to normal after you change the colors or turn bone colors off. I think this bug is fixed now thankfully.


Overall ARP is a great rigging tool, but it’s missing one feature that could be a game changer for the addon, and I really hope to see the stretchy hips feature someday.

[richie]

Thank you for this comparison! I really needed this to decide which one im going to use for the work pipeline :3

[onkelfurunkel]

I tried ARP and I must say that I'm slightly frustrated.
Don't get me wrong, there are some awesome features (the face options like lips roll and sticky lips - retargeting - skinning tools - animation parameters and more)

But to me, the way bones are organized (and some of the naming conventions) feels messy. Also, the fact that some deform bones are displayed as custom shapes can be hard to work with when weightpainting. And there's not enough distinction between the FK and IK bones in terms of shapes and colors, compared to Rigify.

About the armatures presets (human, dog, etc): for a preset, I feel the layers should be more organized. By that I mean having separated layers for the torso, legs, arms, etc, ready to go.
The only layer separation we get are the main / secondary collections. And same goes for the actual rig ui layers, that I have to set up myself, by selecting the controllers I want and assigning them to a ui layer. Meanwhile, Rigify's presets have an actual ui ready to go, with proper separation of the body parts.

Something else that I find annoying is that by default, all the controllers are set to Euler XYZ instead of Quaternion (wether it's a preset character or custom limbs). This might be a personnal preference, but Quaternion avoids gimbal lock, and should be favored for most controllers in a rig (again, Rigify does it right).Thankfully, there is a Rotation Mode Convertor that allows to change selected controllers to Quaternion or Euler, but it would be nice if I could choose that before generating the rig.

And now the most frustrating part, custom limbs. If you want a simple customization (like a character with 3 arms or 2 heads), it should be fine. But when trying to create a more complex custom rig, you will reach the limit of the addon very quickly. Because the predefined behavior of those custom limbs doesn't let you parent them to any limb you want, and results in an error if you try to do so.
When looking at ARP's documentation, there seems to be a workaround, but I have to say that the explanation is quite vague. From what I understand, it involves parenting the controllers after generating the rig, which is not ideal (I'll have to try that out again to be sure).
Also, you can't even rename ARP's bones, otherwise you will get an error when trying to generate the rig (meanwhile in Rigify you can rename bones without a problem). This feels inconsistent because there are some very specific limb types that you CAN rename (like the kilt limb), but not the rest. At least there's an option to rename the armature.

Apart from that, you can add your own custom bones, and even mark them as "deform" bones when exporting to FBX/GLTF, which is nice. But when adding custom bones, ARP can't turn them into reference bones, meaning they just stay as regular Blender bones (no limb options).
Adding a custom bone is pretty much like "basic.super_copy" / "basic.raw_copy" bones in Rigify, except that in Rigify it's a much cleaner setup. Because it's still considered as a Rigify bone, and you can change the bone type whenever you want. Meanwhile in ARP, you're stuck with the bone you created, that you can't convert to a "ref bone" (equivalent of a "metarig" bone).

So in the end, I think that ARP is a powerful and useful tool, with really cool settings for animation and other features mentionned in the beginning of my comment. It has an advantage for game engines export, and if you just need a basic Biped or Quadruped, or a simple custom armature, it should be perfectly fine.
But if you need a more complex custom rig, with more clarity in the bones hierarchy, Rigify is much more flexible. I haven't tried CGDive's game tool addon yet, but if it allows me to properly export custom Rigify rigs to FBX/GLTF, that would be fantastic. Also the fact that Rigify is free, comes with Blender and allows for an easy workflow in collaborative projects is a big plus.

[ayoadeabobarin]

Please i want to know how to customize bones in autorig pro

[arrowmoviez]

I thing both are great as far you are pro level