What is Retargify?

Retargify is a plugin that completely overhauls Rigify, focusing on streamlining the setup process by eliminating time-consuming steps, improving the animation experience, allowing you to bring your animations to any software and providing you with consistent and easy to use armatures thanks to Rigify without sacrificing any features, all while maintaining compatibility with other software.

Why Was it Created?

For a long time I’ve worked with game armatures, which are simple for the best performance, but difficult to handle as an animator, making them a challenge that required quick but limited solutions, or proper but time-consuming ones. This made the setup process a time-consuming chore and the animation process unenjoyable.

Retargify was created to provide a third option which is fast, consistent and feature complete, maintaining the armature's structure (For maximum compatibility) while providing you with complete control over the armature during the setup process.

While the plugin was made with game armatures in mind, any armature can benefit from it as it allows you to maintain skinning data while providing a consistent animation experience, which not only saves you plenty of time, but also opens the door for many more characters with existing armatures.

Features

Rigify  - Overhauled

Retargify is still in essence, Rigify, with the addition of many Quality-of-Life improvements to make the workflow faster, more flexible, and easier to understand. Many features have been added and others re-organized to maximize efficiency, but despite that, all Rigify tutorials and knowledge can still be used without major changes to the overall process.

Non-Destructive

The plugin works through armature duplicates and constraints, all created automatically. This way you’re given full control over the armature while keeping the real data intact, ensuring that compatibility with the software it belongs to is not lost. Feel free to add, move and remove bones!

Quick Fixing

Armatures can be quickly updated without losing animation data, letting you fix mistakes, or experiment with bone parameters. So no matter how many times you update, you can keep working right where you left off.

Quick Tools

Such as bone collection presets, allowing you to save, reuse and even share bone collection data with other people. Auto-sorting of bones to collections based on Rigify bone type (Mainly for humanoid rigs). Automatic constraint linking of the base armature to the animation armature, and much more.

Easy Baking

Transfer your animations from the animation armature to the base armature in a single click, with 1:1 accuracy! You are given plenty of control over which animations to bake, while automatically removing unneeded clutter, avoiding repeated data and keeping file sizes small.

Backwards Baking

Motion captured data or similar can be baked directly onto the Rigify armature. This way you can tweak the animation with ease with advanced Rigify controls, and paired with custom names, you could even share animations between different armatures!

Breakdown

• A seamless non-destructive workflow. Allowing any armature to be used while ensuring compatibility with game engines and other software.
• Complete control over the armature in the setup stage. Add, move and remove bones, create constraints, and much more!
• Common parameters have been organized in a single convenient place.
• Bones are automatically colored based on their bone type for better readability.
• Bone collection presets. Letting you to save bone collection data and reuse it when needed.
• Baking tools. Making it easier than ever to transfer animations from the Rigify armature onto the base armature, or the other way around, unlocking many animation possibilities!
• Quick bake and export to FBX.
• Easy armature updating system, keeping animation data between updates, ensuring you can continue where you left off no matter how many times you re-generate the armature.
• Automatic sorting of bones to collections based on rigify bone types. Works best with humanoid rigs.
• More informative tooltips for unclear Rigify errors.
• Automatic fixing of common Rigify problems.
• Functions to solve common armature problems.
• Custom name support for posing symmetry support in special cases, or for more streamlined bone names. Allowing animation armatures to share animations if they have the same bone names.
• Non-intrusive. With a single toggle you can switch out of the setup stage, or disable the animation armature constraints.
• Connect chain function, letting you quickly connect chains of bones together. Specially useful for disjointed armatures.
• The setup armature can be synced to any base armature changes with a single click, updating all bone data to match the new changes, without removing custom bones added.
• Enhanced collection assign menu to easily move bones (including its FK/Tweak bones) to the desired collection.
• Generated rigs can be used by anyone even if they don't own the plugin, while also retaining some Retargify features like the baking tools.
• Additional toggles in the preferences to extend animation capabilities if you don't intend to export to other software.
• Does not override Rigify, So you’re still able to use vanilla Rigify if you ever need to.
• Support for ALL LTS versions (Including the no longer supported ones!).

Documentation to the plugin (And step by step guide) can be found here!

Issues with the plugin can be reported here!