Mr Mannequins Tools [v1.4]
Mr Mannequin has raised his standards! Don’t believe me? Watch this export video!
Watch that in 2k or 4k though as Blender footage gets murdered by YouTubes downscaling.
So… I got a MegaGrant late last year and set my mind to making the most amazing animation controls, retargeting and export/import that Mr Mannequin has ever seen.
Now, please humour me while i peddle my wares a little bit…
I’ve spent months upon months perfecting and stupid proofing everything i was doing in the last update of this add-on and the result has turned into more than 15 Blender add-ons that work with and without each other and are being tested by a variety of professionals. This is the only the first of several releases that is going to turn some heads with the functionality it provides…
You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to stay up to date with what i’m doing and where things are headed. (Just do a twitter though… i hardly use the other two)
First let me tell you where to get the add-on… Then lets go through the new things, some planned things and the reason why i’m still bothering with this considering how many Blender to Unreal add-ons there are on top of Epics own BlenderTools.
Get the things…
- Get it for free on Gumroad (donations appreciated).
- And from the GitHub Repository (read the readme installation if you go here).
- As well as Blender Market (10% of proceeds go straight to Blender).
- You can sign up on Patreon to get priority support and early access to things!
The newest things…
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Modular and easy to edit rigging that works on ANY armature with advanced features that other rigging add-ons can only dream of supporting such as automatic IK to FK and FK to IK, spline based controls and a much improved head tracking system. (Much more to come on this front too… RIP Rigify lol)
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Intuitive skeletal compatibility that enables you to edit existing assets as quickly and easily as possible without messing around with bone axes.
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The export has never been so smooth, you select what you want to export, tweak a couple of settings and my scripts do the rest to provide you with .FBX files that will work with whatever asset you got them from. I even managed to speed up the batch exporting around ten times over!
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I added a mannequin themed sword and shield, as well as Epics own Female mannequin that got added to the third person template.
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A much better pipeline to push updates, meaning i can implement changes and fixes very easily so there will be more of them than before.
Things still to come…
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An import guide video as well as some further improvements for importing existing assets to be edited within Blender. (I ran out of time to squeeze those into this update)
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A full “Any Humanoid Retargeted to The Mannequin” course, for a while i’ve been doing a put-my-character-on-the-mannequins-skeleton service and all my scripts for that work so well i’ll be putting them into their own add-on and making it a built-in part of Mr Mannequins just like the rigging.
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A whole host of mannequin themed templates like my Sword, Shield, Bow and Femmequin, i’m talking cats, dogs, fish, birds, horses etc, there’s even plans to do a mannequin dragon!
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Support for my rigging and templates to use Epics own Send To Unreal add-on. (Seriously James and Kaye and everyone who has helped them have done a fantastic job with it! Much love <3)
Why this thing and not the other thing?
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This iteration of my rigging is probably more advanced and easier to work with than anything you have ever seen. I can rig the mannequin from just deforming bones to animation ready in less than ten minutes with it, so any semi-experienced rigger could achieve this on their characters as well!
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I’m working with the developers of character creation suites as well as other add-ons to provide compatibility with my rigging, the mannequins skeleton and Unreal Engine on a larger scale.
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To join Mr Mannequins Army a thriving and helpful Discord community of Blender > Unreal developers with a huge range in experience and the dankest taste in memes. Add-on support is currently in the process of being moved elsewhere but is currently going on there as well.
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The ease of use Mr Mannequins Tools provides compared to all it’s competitors, except a couple of add-ons that are easy to use but do not provide nearly as much support and/or content.
If it wasn’t for that discord server and the continued support many people in there have given me i might of given up ages ago… but i didn’t and so i owe them a massive thank you!
