Easy rig kit help

What is the Prima Easy Rig kit?

The easy rig kit is an addon to the prima mesh creators kit that can help creators solve some common issues with mesh creation. The kit provides two services:

First, you can use the "Easy Fit" meshes to adapt meshes from Petite to Busty with just a few clicks!

Next, you can optionally use the "Easy Rig" meshes to quickly copy weights to your mesh and reduce the time it takes you to rig your mesh. The results will vary from mesh to mesh, some designs require no work at all and are finished, others require some weight cleanup. Regardless, test the weights and see. Some designs (e.g. tight fitting bras or things like that) will not benefit from the "Easy Rig" kit so using the mesh bodies will likely get you the best results.

How to use the Easy Fit kit

For this short tutorial we are going to be using a swimsuit mesh I made awhile ago and use the Easy Fit kit to adapt the petite version to busty.

If you've never used blender Shape Keys before I suggest you look at a tutorial video or read the blender documentation as Shape Keys are a key feature of blender used by the Easy Fit kit. This video for the first two minutes gives a simple and clear example of how to use shape keys:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZKhS7pOww

Next, if you've never used Avastar to freeze a mesh before, here is an important thing you should do to get it ready for you. To do this make sure one of the mesh bodies is visible (and bound to the rig - which is how they come in the devkit). After selecting the body, on the Avastar Skinning panel select Keep for what Freeze will do with the mesh when a mesh is frozen. This setting is saved globally so you only need to do this once. Don't use Freeze right now, all we're doing is getting the global setting right for the future.

For the swimsuit mesh shown above we want to select the easy fit mesh that is most appropriate for the refit to busty. In this case we want to use the pants helper and the one that is for the default "white stickman" shape used by the Prima devkit. NOTE: Some designers, like myself, prefer to work with the bust shape of 50-50-50 (middle slider value settings), and for those I've included alternate helpers and alternate Easy Rig meshes.

Next, I'm adding a Surface Deform modifier to the swimsuit mesh. Notice that I'm putting it on top of the modifier stack. After that we're going to bind it to the Easy Fit mesh that we picked out by pressing the "Bind" button shown in the image (snapshot was taken just before binding).

Choose pants helper

Add Surface Deform Modifier

Bind to correct Easy Fit helper

Time to go! Lets pick the shape key we want and turn it on!

So what's going on here? After binding the Surface Deform to the pants helper mesh the swimsuit mesh will track shape changes made to the helper mesh in realtime as the shape keys are used. What I've shown with these four snapshots is choosing the correct key, turning it on, adding in a full amount of the loose fit shape key for busty, and then deciding that was too much and adjusting the loose fit (for busty) shape key down to half. As you can see the yellow swimsuit mesh has changed shape as the Shape Keys have become active and changed values.

Time to finish! First you can hide the helper mesh and then we can save the changes the Surface Deform modifier has calculated for the swimsuit to the swimsuit mesh:

Wait? More Shape Keys. Yes, more shape keys. Shape keys are a non-destructive way of modifying your mesh, so why not? (HINT: You can duplicate them and then make edits to the shapeyes to tidy things up, again non destrucively). And as I've shown above you can combine them (imagine adding in edits for a perky bust). Now that you have saved your shape key, lets get the mesh ready for rigging. First, since you've saved the Surface Deform changes as a shape key, you can remove the modifier from your modifier stack. Then switch to object properties view and it's time to apply that shape key and get our final busty version of the swimsuit mesh

Now that we have our final swimsuit mesh we can rig however we choose. As it turns out using the busty loosefit version provided in the Easy Rig part of the kit works perfectly and the result can be exported to Second Life (after using the clean operator on all verticies and vertex groups).

Also, don't forget to reset the shape keys in the helper mesh for next time.

I hope this tutorial has been helpful and you can quickly come up to speed using this super helpful kit. Questions? Ask for help in the discord creator-support channel :)