Reallusion recently rolled out new upgrades for Character Creator 4 and iClone 8 to include the new advanced AccuRIG tool that makes rigging character meshes a snap. No tedious bone matching is necessary either as the tool makes a calculated guess at marker placement that you then refine to your location of choice if necessary.

This applies to multi and single mesh characters.

Some characters are so flawless that AccuRIG does an excellent job all the way down to the fingers. I experience just such a model in testing. 2012 Arenanet Character Art Test over at Sketchfab is the model in question. I was amazed at how AccuRIG properly placed markers in the right locations all the way down to the multi-segmented finger bones.

All I had to do was download the model from Sketchfab, extract it and drag the FBX file into the CC4 workspace as a prop. Very important you choose prop in the initial drag and drop operation. This brings up the AccuRIG button in the Modify panel. Press the button to start the rigger.

The Three Major Steps in the Process, Dot Placement, Convert to Skeleton, Bind Skeleton. Notice the auto-hand rigging accuracy in this model.

Once the rigger is active you will see a new control panel under the AccuRIG button. The model was too small, so I scaled up using a CC Blank avatar as a guide which I then deleted leaving the scaled-up model. To activate AccuRIG at this point, you have to press the Reset Transform button to sort out the scale to 100 percent at the new size.

After this, you press the Create Guides button which after a bit of computing will place markers at their best guess. You can use the movement tools to refine the locations but make sure you are in orthogonal view mode in the viewport to be able to line them up in 3D. After this, you set the number of fingers and press the Generate Skeleton button.

After some more behind-the-scenes action, the new skeleton will appear. You also tweak the location of the bones too. Must be mindful of the view mode so things move in the right direction… or should I say the expected direction.

The AccuRigged Character with no Manual Movement or Placement

In most cases, you now click on the left- and right-hand views to manually straighten out any misaligned finger bones but in this case, all were in great shape and worked flawlessly with skipping that step and going straight to the Bind Skin button. After it finishes this task, you should have a working character that you can now test with animations.

In a three-fingered model, I had to adjust almost all of the dots on the hand and fingers before making the skeleton but in this test model, nothing had to be moved. If the characters are not symmetrical from arm to arm and leg to leg then you’ll have to adjust one or the other. On models with good symmetry, you should be able to use the Mirror feature to set the dots on both sides at one time.

The Model:

"2012 ArenaNet Character Art Test" (https://skfb.ly/6nP8G) by Ezra Lau is licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

While not all character models will rig this easily in AccuRIG, you might just find that many do and that saves a lot of work in the long run.

The update installed itself flawlessly via the Reallusion Hub on one of my computers, but I had to exit and restart the Hub on another computer to get the update to show up. It runs great on both the i9 and i7 computers. It’s another great update from a company with a history of great updates.

M.D. McCallum, aka WarLord, is an international award-winning commercial graphics artist, 3D animator, published author, project director, and webmaster with a freelance career that spans over 20 years.  Now retired, M.D. is currently working part-time on writing and select character development projects. You can learn more about MD on his website.