How come my Rigify rig is bending my characters elbows and knees thew wrong way?

Question

I am rigging a character by modifying the 'Human (Meta Rig)' armature that comes with Blender, then generating the rig using 'Rigify' section in the armatures object data properties. When I generate the rig and parent it to my charcter, the elbows and knees are bending the wrong way. I have rigged characters this way multiple times and usually dont run into problems. If I do bending the elbow and knee slightly in the proper direction on the armature usually fixes it, but it didn't fix it this time. Anyone know of any fixes?

My blend file can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-4CEyTTh5hnT8yUyU7m2EXXg1jY13bp7?usp=share_link

P.S. I left a gif of my problem and some screenshots of the armature bones/knees in the folder too. Everytime I try to post anything images/gifs on here it just says 'error on the server occured' so sorry about that lol.

Answer 1

In Armature edit mode the bones angles appear to be bending inversely:

My guess is that in fitting the bones to the character mesh, you created this angle the will cause rigify to create an incorrect "thigh_ik.*" initial angle.

I rotated the "thigh_ik.*" 180 degrees and the character now appears to pose as desired:

Here is my tweek, minus a lot a data (meshes, materials) to create a smaller file: