4.16.26: Drivers are a lot more complex than I thought

So we all know drivers drive things which is great and all, but you can also change the curve of influence which opens up a whooole other universe of possibilities. At first I was like oh k I can use this for stop motion ig that's pretty neat, but you guys. Shape key breakdowns with drivers. My character's eyes are wayy too spherical for me to just use one shape key since shape keys can only move a vertex from one point to another in a straight line, but with drivers you can curve that path of motion by curving the driver's influence graph so your eyelids don't clip through the eyeball!!! I still don't understand how to write custom expressions for drivers bc I haven't written one in 2 years but I'll probably have to get there one day so I'll return to this post once I figure it out.

4.15.26: automatic secondary action pt. 2 (glitches)

While testing your movement in pose mode, you might notice that your damped tracks seem to disconnect from one another when you KNOW they're connected and parented properly. Nothing's wrong, I think it's just a glitch that only happens before you've placed any keyframes. Once you create your first keyframe, your damped tracked bones should be connected to each other in movement as normal. In general when working with damped tracks, it's good to place a keyframe before your animation to reset the position of all of the bones, otherwise the first few frames of your rendered animation might move a little funky.

4.14.26: Im rolling it im rolling it

The finger rolls usually come out doodoo when you first generate your rig, especially if you didnt rig your mesh in standard T pose. First you need to see where the bones' axes are pointing, so go into your object's data panel > viewport display > axes and enable them. Now you can go into pose mode, select the first finger bone, go into the bone panel > rigify type > bend rotation axis: and change automatic to Z manual. Go back into edit mode and use control R to roll the finger bone until the z axis is pointing into the correct direction you want your fingers to curl. You may have to fix ALL of your finger bones if you're still worried. Now when you generate your rig again, the fingers should roll exactly how you want.

4.6.26: I made a mistake.

One fateful day, I finished weight painting my mesh... only to realize it didn't transfer to my rigify-generated-rig! This is because when rigify generates a rig, it adds a "DEF-" prefix to every bone. With this prefix, your vertex groups don't recognize its parents, sad ik, so to fix this you can either add "DEF-" to the beginning of every vertex group manually (noob), or use the simple renaming addon to add the same "DEF-" prefix to all of your vertex groups at once(hacker).

4.6.26: Why isn't the "mirror vertex group" function only affecting the vertex group i'm selecting??

MAYBE it's just the rig i'm using, and this shouldn't even be a problem because you set up the mirror weight paint correctly RIGHT??? But when I duplicate a vertex group and try to mirror it, it also mirrors the vertex group I duplicated it from too which... who told you you could do that hello?? Easy solution, remember to do "mirror vertex group (topology)" and THEN "mirror verte group" and the original vertex group should be unaffected. I'm gonna be so honest I have no idea what this does or why it works bc I accidentally discovered it so yeah

4.6.26: automatic secondary action (tails n stuff)

Animating secondary action in 2d is really fun, but in 3d you have a whole other axis to pay attention to and honestly it's just easier to let the computer do it with damped track contraints. To set it up, select the bone at the end of the chain, then shift select the second to last bone, and control + shift + c to open the constraints menu and add a damped track contraint. Lower the influence to something like .4 and keep doing that down the chain until you reach the first bone in the chain. Satisfying!!