Auto-Rig Pro v3.71.25 for Blender Free Download

July 16, 2024 7 Min Read

What is Auto-Rig Pro?

Auto-Rig Pro is an addon for Blender to rig characters, retarget animations, and provide Fbx/Gltf export, with settings for
First developed as my own in-house rigging tool, I’ve released it a few years ago and it expanded quickly thanks to great support from the community!

Tip: If you want to be notified when a new version is released, then consent to receive emails from creators.

Want to try first? Download Mike, free character rig

Modular – Fully Featured

Customize the rig definition in a few clicks: fingers, wings, toes, spine bones, multiple neck bones, tail, breasts, ears and much more. Duplicate or remove limbs to rig spiders, centaurs… or anything that makes more or less sense

Remap

The Remap feature allows retargetting of any armature action to another one, with different bone names and bone orientations, supporting imported .bvh/.fbx armatures for example. It’s universal: works with Auto-Rig Pro, Rigify, custom rigs… Define the source armature, the target armature, and the animation will retarget according to the bones names matches and bones original orientation.

It support IK feet, hands for accurate motion tracking, and an interactive offset tool to remap to different characters proportions.

Export Types:
Universal to export the skeleton of any creatures
Humanoid for bipeds only, with options for easy retargetting and root motion in game engines

Support of multiple twist bones for optimal volume preservation in game engines, where dual quaternions skinning is not possible (top: single twist bone, below: 4 twist bones)
Unit conversion to initialize the scale transforms values to 1.0 in Unity and Unreal Engine
Unreal Mannequin compliant: support Mannequin bones hierarchy, bone axes conversion, bones naming for UE4/UE5
Automatic A-Pose
Support full facial rig, and advanced bones. “Twist” mode for secondary controllers, wrapped on bendy-bones for smooth curves effects, leading to 1:1 export compatibility in Fbx format
- “Soft-Linking” for cheap stretchy bone effect, Fbx compliant
- Actions are baked to the simplified rig
- Animated shape keys (blend shapes) support
- Selective/multiple action export
- Root motion support
Bring your poses to the next level!

The Secondary Controllers offer a unique control over the pose. Located all along the limbs, they’re dedicated to fine pose sculpting, cartoon effects, bending, stretching, etc. Three deformations mode in option: Twist (exportable to Fbx and bendy-bones based for best compatibility), Additive (exportable to FBX), Bendy-Bones (Blender only).

Just use them instead of corrective shape keys, or as a complement. Below a typical leg bent before and after tweaking the secondary controller

Built to Last

Blender is constantly improving and updating, and so is Auto-Rig Pro. But even though upgrades are nice, we don’t want to miss the old rigs because of compatibility issues with newer versions. That’s why backward-compatibility is always ensured at all costs, even if it involves a lot of maintenance on the code side. A legacy menu takes care of preserving features from the past. And if necessary, an “Update” button will upgrade the rigs automatically to the latest requirements, no loss!

Tell Me More!

Extensive list of what the addon has to offer:

Automatic bone placement solver based on mesh recognition for bipeds characters. Asymmetrical models supported.
Edit Reference Bones feature to modify the rig anytime you want. No need to redo everything if a bone is not where you want it to be.
Apply Pose as Rest Pose feature to quickly change the rest pose of the character, aligning reference bones on it and applying armature modifiers in a single click
Modular: only rig what you need. Fingers, toes, ears, breast, adjustable amount of spine, neck, twist bones, tail, and neck bones… Duplicate, remove limbs to rig creatures with multiple arms and legs.
Fingers auto-rotation option: bend when scaling the first phalange, pre-defined fist pose
Easy controller shape edition
Bone picker: Can be turned on/off, import/export presets. Customizable.
Colors customization
Cartoon compliant: stretchy spine, legs, arms…
IK-FK snap autokey compliant, snaps properly when unlocking all the leg/forearm rotation axis
IK-FK controllers auto hide
Hybrid IK pole / IK arrow vector
2 or 3 bones IK chains for legs
Knees and elbows pinning
Head rotation locked or free
Bend all fingers in one click (fingers grasp), fist pre-defined pose, auto rotation of fingers phalanges from scale
IK/FK eyes
Auto-eyelid rotation
Multiple Child-Of constraints support for the IK hands and feet to change their parent space any time (e.g. if the character is driving a car, hands on the wheel, then grab the car door)
Complete set of secondary controllers for fine pose sculpt
Advanced facial setup with automated placement
Improved skinning based on Blender’s heatmaps. Auto-splitting of multiple elements + voxelization. Compliant with the Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning addon.
Shape keys drivers creation tool
Game engines support, FBX, GLTF: Unity – Unreal Engine – Godot. Generic, Humanoid and Universal rig type
Bone remapper to retarget any armature action to another one, with different bone names and bone orientations. IK support. BVH, FBX files compliant, e.g. Mixamo animations.
Compliant with X-Muscle System for realistic muscles simulation

Updates:

Make sure to uninstall the current addon before installing the new one and restart blender.

–[3.71.25]–

New/improved:

Rig: New 3 Bones Leg Type 2 setting (old default one is Type 1). This is a complete revised version of the 3 bones leg, with an IK rotation controller at the calf joint, and extra stretch controller for the upper thigh.
Rig: “_bend” secondary controllers are now white color by default
Rig: “Set Character Name” now also renames the cs_grp empty object
Rig: Edit Ref Bones/Match to Rig now preserve the visibility of user-added collections
Rig: Multiple Spine limbs are now supported
Rig: Kilt limbs support in “Apply Pose as Rest Pose”
Rig: Facial: New “Linear Y” and “Linear Z” settings in Limb Options, to better define for each axis the shape of the lips when moving the corner controller (was a single value driving all axes before). Plus, to fine-tweak the result, individual custom properties located on the lips reference bones can be adjusted: “linear_Y” and “linear_Z”.
Rig: Facial: The “Linear (Corners)” and “Linear (Jaw)” parameters in Limb Options now support negative values, allowing even more curved interpolation
Rig: Facial: New “Soft” setting for eyebrows. This allows to deform smoothly the eybrows when moving the c_eyebrow_full “controller”.
Rig: Facial: New “Masters” setting for eyebrows. This adds 2 master controllers at the root and tip of the eyebrow, to adjust the global shape of the eyebrow quickly
Rig: UI: Since the facial Limb Options panel was getting over-populated, it has been redesigned with tabs to display Eyes, Mouth, and Others settings only.
Rig: New “IK Pole Height” setting for 3 Bones Legs. Setting it to 0.0 allows backward-compat. with older versions
Rig: Facial: New eyelid masters in option (Limb options). Useful to tweak numerous eyelid bones at once. Complies with the Blink Pose and export tools.
Skin: Shape Keys can now be evaluated in their current state when binding
Remap: New Heat preset
Export: New actions are now exportable by default
Export: “Custom Export Scripts” can now be embedded in the Blender file (text editor)
Export: Vertex Colors: New “Prioritze Active Color” setting
Export: New “Ignore Linked Actions” setting to prevent linked actions from exporting
Export: When shape keys cannot be baked because of a modifier altering the vertex count, a message now reports it after exporting
Preferences: The default paths of custom Armatures, Limbs, Rig Layers… are now set to User/Documents/AutoRigPro
Picker: Major speed improvement when selecting a picker bone. There was overhead in the bone selection/ armature collection management, it has been refactored. Selecting a bone from the picker is now almost instant, while it could take up to one second before.
Picker: Multiple eyelid bones and eyelid masters are now supported in the picker panel
Picker: Multiple lip bones and lip masters are now supported in the picker panel

Fixed:

Rig: “Apply Pose as Rest Pose” was missing support for Bendy-Bones limbs
Rig: Missing toes activation in Limb Options when adding a leg limb
Rig: Missing constraints removal when unsetting “Spine Master Controller”
Rig: Error when disabling eyebrows
Rig: Facial: Error with soft-lips “Visual Only”
Rig: 3 Bones Leg Type 2 returning layer error in Blender pre 4x versions
Rig Tools: Invalid 3 Bones Leg Type 1 FK to IK baking
Rig Tools: Invalid 3 Bones Leg Type 1 IK to FK baking
Smart: Error when a 2-spine bones armature was already existing in the scene
Export: The spine bones amount was not evaluated properly when exporting as a humanoid, since the spine limb is now a duplicable limb
Export: UE: The “joints fans” were preventing to export a valid hierarchy when enabling Mannequin Axes
Export: Error when exporting spine limbs in Universal mode
Export: The dummy mesh could not export anymore, the view_layer update needed to be triggered manually
Export: Linked actions were localized accidentally in the file
Export: Spine bone error when exporting as a Humanoid, and missing spine animation/constraints when exporting as Universal
Export: “Prioritze Active Color” were not compatible with Blender versions pre 4.1
Skin: Smooth Twist Weights was not working with pre-3.6 Blender versions