How do I rig wings on my character that will work with rigify?

Question

I want to use rigify to pose and animate my character. The problem is the rig won't generate correctly. The tail on my character generates when I press "generate rig", but the wings on my character don't get rigged. I've set the bones up and everything. Does anyone know if it's difficult for rigify to generate a rig for winged characters? Also does anyone know if there's a specific way that I need to set up the rig on the wings for rigify to handle it correctly?

Answer 1

Here's a way to rig wings using rigify.

Start with the default human meta-rig, and line up the existing bones to your character as normal. I'm rigging a humanoid character, but if you aren't this should work with any of the base meta-rigs.

Next place the 3D cursor where the wing meets the back and add a chain of three bones corresponding to the three bones. This chain can be larger than that if it fits your wings, but it must be at least three bones long as we're going to tell rigify that it's an arm. Three bones fits perfectly to the anatomy of a birds wing, or insect wings like on my character, where I can match the curvature.

Rename these bones so that they have names that end in .L (assuming you're on the left); duplicate the chain of bones, mirror the duplicate hain to put it in the right direction, and then move it roughly to where it should go. Rename these second set of bones, replacing the .Ls with .Rs. Select both chains, and use Armature > Symmetrize to get matching bone placements. (Now parent them to their respective shoulder bones -- if you later have problems with FK but IK works, this is probably the problem.)

Go into Pose mode, and select the first bone of one of the wing chains. In the Bone Properties set that bone's Rig Type to "limbs.super_limb", and the limb type to Arm, and the rotation axis to Z manual, assuming Z is up. Then, select the first bone of the second wing chain and set these values there as well. You only need to do this for the first bone on each wing.

Generate your rig! I get this:

And it distorts correctly for bird wings -- additional work with the settings and weights will get you more precise results for other wing types.