How to make a Rigify character bend at the hips?

Question

When I have a character that I have rigged with the Rigify "Human (Meta-Rig)" metarig, how do I get the rigged character to bend forward at the hips?

In other words, I want the character to be able to bend forward at the hips so the body is in an "L" shape of sorts:

The "hips" bone just wiggles the hips; it doesn't control the upper body at all. I don't see any obvious sort of switch that would let the "hips" bone control the upper body.

The "chest" bone does pretty much what I want to do, where when you rotate it forward, all of the upper body moves with it. However, the location of the bend is not low enough; I want to do the same sort of action lower in the body.

(I don't want to redo the metarig and move the spine bones down so the chest control bone is created lower, as the ability to bend at the midsection as the "chest" bone does is useful too.)

I'm thinking there has to be a way to easily do this, but I've been unable to figure out how. What am I missing?

Answer 1

If you switch the Pivot Point to the 3D Cursor, you can place it where you want the rotations to pivot from. Then, you just need to select both the chest and hips bones and rotate them as needed. Rotating them together like this should give you the pose you want.

Another approach is to rotate the spine_fk bones (spine_fk, spine_fk.001, spine_fk.002, and spine_fk.003). You will still need to use the 3D Cursor as the pivot point and place it where you want to pivot from (around the hips from the side view).

Please note that you may need to pose the legs afterwards if you want to use FK. If you use IK, the legs will already be on the ground.

Answer 2

I figured out what was happening. Somehow, the torso control on the Rigify rig had its rotation locked. Once I unlocked it, I was able to bend the rig at the hips.

Most likely, this was my fault! However, I've got it working now.