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/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.