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• Joel Walden

  over 1 year ago

  This under-appreciated addon is a real time saver for getting Grease Pencil (or Clay Pencil!) layers instantly connected to an armature. The bones and layers just need the same name, and a couple button clicks later, your GP drawing is moving with your armature.

  This is great for cutout-style characters / environment GP art. Basically stuff that moves. You can bind layers to bones manually without the addon, but this does it all with one click. That's huge for fast iteration. Sketch out your rough features, use Pencil Rig to quickly bind them to bones, and refine the art and armature as you go.

  I could see this addon being especially useful for complex 2d characters with lots of moving details and a a complex and evolving armature. (like detailed bird wings for example) You don't want to have to carefully redo parenting or vertex weighting every time you need to change the bone hierarchy. Pencil Rig lets you instantly disconnect and reconnect bones and GP layers, so you're free to make radical changes to your armature without any real pain. Just keep the names of the bones and layers consistent and you're golden.

  The addon appears to join one-bone-per-layer. So it's not using vertex weights. I don't see a reason why you couldn't have some layers vertex-weighted and some Pencil Rigged. The addon just doesn't create vertex weights (to my knowledge). It only matches whole GP layers to specific bones.

  And yes, you can still have a frame-by-frame hand-drawn animation on a GP layer and then bind that to a bone. Still works.

  Final tip -- if for some reason you want two or more GP layers all following the same bone (and you don't want to just merge the layers), just give that bone one or more child bones. Bind the layers in question to those child bones (make sure the bone/GP layer names match), and one button click later, they're bound to your rig.

  A really excellent tool for cutout GP rigging, good developer support and a minimal learning curve -- I highly recommend it.

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