Rig On The Fly

Rig on the Fly is a rigging tool for Blender 3.6 and 4.4. It is available for free and aims to simplify and speed up the animation workflow.

Inspired by Richard Lico's Space Switching techniques, it automates repetitive rigging tasks by creating the exact control rig you need for a specific animation on the fly (as the addon’s name suggests).

This approach allows animators to dynamically change how the rig functions without losing existing motion. It enables animators to focus more on performance rather than working around rig limitations.

Rig on the Fly offers features like space switching, IK/FK control, and rig states to provide a clean and flexible animation experience. You can bake down the rig and remove all traces of the add-on once the animation is complete.

Personally, I found it useful in mocap editing and clean-up since you can non-destructively give any limb of the motion capture data a temporary control (such as IK) and use it to more easily improve the motion. Then bake the edits back to the mocap bones and discard the temporary controls. This leaves you with a simple mocap skeleton that you can retarget to other rigs.

Downloads

https://dypsloom.com/Assets/RigOnTheFly/

https://gitlab.com/dypsloom/rigonthefly

Quick Overview Rig On The Fly

Documentation & Tutorials

ReadMe

README.md · master · Dypsloom / RigOnTheFly · GitLabBlender Dynamic Rigging tool used to speed up and simplify animation workflow.GitLab

Presentation Playlist by the Addon Developers

Additional Information by Rigging Dojo

Agora community Free Blender Rigs - Rigging DojoIn collaboration with Agora.Community and AnimChallange, we converted a few assets for Maya created by Riot Games, to Blender. We used Blender 2.92 and the RigOnTheFly addon is required to get the most from these rigs. Look at the learning guide video on this page for a quick introduction of featureRigging Dojo

Underlying Principles

Rig on the Fly is heavily inspired by Richard Lico’s animation workflow based on Space Switching.

Richard’s GDC Talk discussing the Space Switching Workflow

Animating Quill: Creating an Emotional Experienceby GDC Festival of GamingYouTube

Richard’s Course teaching the workflow

Podcast

A podcast discussing some of the underlying principles and ideas behind Rig on the Fly.