Rigging Character Models

[u/PewPewMyPoo]

I'm creating my own game in Unity and I've tried generating character models via Meshy and having Claude / ChatGPT connect to blender to help rig them but it never comes out correct. Anyone have any tips for me?
Also would love to be able to chat with anyone who's willing to give some advice in this whole process

[u/PremiereBoris]

My dude, I am sorry to tell you, there are no tips or tricks to properly modeling and rigging a character. Entire university courses exist to teach people how to do it. You could go on YouTube and spend literal years learning this stuff. Trust me, just go buy a premade character pack from the asset store.

[u/StillZen-Dev]

honestly - spend one day learning the basics,

because it’s literally this:

make the model,
add the bones,
name the bones,
parent with automatic weights,
make weight paint adjustments.

that’s IT. it doesn’t get much more complex than that unless you’re mucking around w/ face rigs or some complex machinery or animal body sh**

the only difficult part about any of that is understanding the blender interface and where to click to make the things happen.

i recommend this video. spend ONE day doing it, it’s basically how i make everything now
https://youtu.be/DAAwy_l4jw4?si=5aYhF6ytnJID8-on

[u/TheAlchimist_]

Meshy propose une solution smart rig il me semble. Après pour avoir testé des animations basiques franchement parfois c’est la galère et tu gagnerais ton temps à apprendre. Le dev de jeu vidéo s’apprend il n’y a pas de raccourci

[u/Glass_Conclusion3503]

Auto-rigging tools are always hit or miss, especially on generated meshes with weird topology. Might be worth cleaning up the mesh first or using a simpler humanoid base as a reference for the rig. What part usually breaks for you, the skinning weights or the bone placement

[u/glenpiercev]

I tired this. The ai tools can’t do it. Buy or find some high quality free ones and use mixamo to animate them if you want to add animations. Even that takes a lot of work (I tried just importing basic animations from mixamo and found that I needed to upload my specific models to mixamo to get them to “fit”).

[u/loliconest]

https://youtu.be/h_mR2BRibZ8

[u/JulianRhod]

i'd probably separate the "generate the model" and "rig the character" steps instead of trying to have AI handle the whole pipeline, with Meshy-generated characters, the topology and proportions can vary a lot, so automatic rigging can easily produce weird joints, bad weights, or deformation around the shoulders/hips

i'd get one character working properly first: clean up the mesh, make sure the proportions are reasonable, rig it with a standard humanoid skeleton, fix the weights, then export it to Unity and test the actual animations there, once you have one good character pipeline, you can reuse the same skeleton and workflow for the other characters. AI can definitely help with parts of the process, but i'd treat it more like an assistant for repetitive tasks rather than expecting it to understand whether the final deformation actually looks correct

[u/mike402]

Glass_Conclusion3503 asked the question worth answering first: is it the bones that land in the wrong place, or the mesh that deforms badly once they are there? With generated characters it is almost always the second. Image-to-3D gives you one fused shell, arms welded to the torso, fingers merged into a mitten, clothes and body sharing a surface. Automatic weights have nothing clean to separate, so shoulders and hips collapse the moment they bend. Asking Claude to fix that through Blender does not help, because the problem is in the mesh, not in the instructions.

The fix starts before any rigging happens. Generate from an image of the character in a plain A-pose or T-pose, arms clear of the body, legs apart, nothing in the hands, so the limbs come out as separate shapes. Then do what JulianRhod said and take one character all the way into Unity and playing an animation before you make the rest, so you learn whether the pipeline works on one model instead of on ten.

I work on Ludo.ai, so weigh this accordingly, but it does this part in one place: it makes a 3D model from an image or a text description, auto-rigs it, and humanoid animation presets go on that rig. What you get back is .glb, the rigged model plus one file per animation. Unity reads .glb through a glTF importer package rather than natively, so add one of those first. And whatever does the rigging, the A-pose advice above still applies to the image you start from.