v0.2.1

Fixes

• Dragging a joint or bone in front, side or top view keeps its depth, so it stays on the axis you're looking down instead of drifting as the cursor passes over other parts of the mesh. Hold Ctrl to centre it inside the mesh anyway.

v0.2.0

Full Changelog: v0.1.0...v0.2.0

v0.1.0

v0.1.0

First release of MeshRig: fast rigging for meshes in .blend files. It is built on the shell of MeshAnimate (Blender bridge, viewport, interface), with the animation tools replaced by rigging.

Skeleton

• Starting skeletons fitted to the model: Humanoid (optional mitten or five-finger hands), Four legs (with tail), Chain, One bone, and Empty. Spine, neck, tail and chain bone counts are adjustable.
• Joints snap to the middle of the mesh under the cursor. Ctrl places them freely.
• Symmetry: .L/.R bones are edited in pairs, and new off-centre bones get a mirrored twin.
• Add bone tool, Draw chain tool, bone tree, and a bone inspector (name, kind, parent, connected, deform, IK, roll).
• Flat (orthographic) views with a view-plane grid; front/side/top views go flat automatically and orbiting returns to perspective.
• Snapping to joints, to the grid (automatic or fixed size) and to angle steps; Shift+drag places freely.
• Auto IK, Mirror L → R, Center in mesh, Delete branch. Full undo and redo.

Parts

• Bind objects or loose pieces rigidly to a bone by clicking them.
• Bone per object, or bone per loose piece, chained by which pieces touch.
• Leave objects out of the rig.
• Select several pieces (Shift+click) and join them into one object (Ctrl+J), optionally welding touching vertices. Joins happen in a working copy until you save, and can be undone.

Skin

• Automatic weights (geodesic voxel binding), Blender bone heat with gap filling, Rigid pieces, and Nearest bone.
• Smoothing, falloff, voxel resolution and bones-per-vertex settings. Small loose pieces follow one bone.
• Weight heat map per bone, or all bones in their own colours.
• Weight brush: Add, Subtract, Smooth, mirrored with symmetry, undoable.

Test

• Pose the skinned rig: swing bones, drag IK hands and feet, move the root.
• Stress test that bends every joint in turn.

Save

• Writes one armature with Deform and Controls bone collections, vertex groups, Armature modifiers and parenting.
• IK targets and poles are generated, with the pole angle calibrated in Blender so the rest pose holds.
• Optional joining of all rigged meshes. Backups in .meshrig-backups/.
• MeshRig's skeleton is stored on the armature, so a rig reopens exactly as it was edited. Armatures made elsewhere can be opened and rebuilt.