Why does my pose position differ from my rest position?

Question

I'm rigging a face! After doing some weight painting, I adjusted the bones so that their placement aligns better with the mesh. Unfortunately, the pose position now differs from the rest position, even though the character hasn't been posed yet. Even resetting the pose with Pose > Clear Transform > All doesn't seem to affect anything.

Upon doing some research, I've found that this likely has something to do with constraints. When I clear the constraints, the position is as it should be, but the rig breaks. However, I don't notice any difference between the pose position and the rest position under the "Bone Constraint Properties" panel. I know very little about constraints, so I don't know what exactly needs to be adjusted.

You can find the .blend file here!

How do I get this character's pose position to match the rest position? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I don't have any experience using rigify but I found that there is a layer for original bones prefixed with ORG and deformation bones prefixed with DEF. Many of the deformation bones have a bone constraint on them which copies their original counterpart.

Here I circled the deformation bones in blue and the original bones in orange:

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

I spent hours trying to fix this until I thought "wait. wouldn't it be easier if I just touch up the metarig and regenerate the rig?"

So, I appended the metarig from the most recent version of the .blend file that still had it (version control!), made those adjustments to make it align better with the mesh, and regenerated the rig.

I then parented the mesh to the rig with Object > Parent > Object and added an armature modifier to the mesh, with the modifier's object set to the newly generated rig.

All is well.

And the weight painting still works!

Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. All I had to do was dig up the metarig and use it to regenerate the rig!