Rigify Pitchipoy, what is it?
Rigify is a free auto-rigging addon for Blender. You most likely landed here because you heard about something called the “pitchipoy” version of Rigify and are trying to find info about it. Keep reading to find out what it is (and why you don’t need to worry about it 🙂 ).
The “pitchipoy” version of Rigify is old news. It was released around 2014 or earlier and has since been updated and upgraded. Yet a lot of people seem to still be googling “blender rigify pitchipoy” and similar. So I decided to write this short article to clear things up.
Blender Rigify Pitchipoy: History
Rigify has had several maintainers over the years. Each one made their own small or large tweaks while taking care of the addon. One of the maintainers was https://pitchipoy.tv/, an animation studio based in Israel.
Their contribution to Rigify is actually a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, they added cool new features, especially to the human rig components of Rigify. They also contributed a whole new face rig. Many of these contributions are still part of the current features of Rigify. On the other hand, they failed to offer continued support and bug fixes to the software (or so I heard). They also created a bunch of new naming conventions which are still part of the addon … and that I personally find confusing.
You can still find an old video on YouTube by the Pitchipoy guys. It’s a nice piece of Blender History but I don’t recommend this video as a learning resource, as both the blender interface and the rigify features are outdated.
Ultimately Pitchipoy was succeeded by https://www.madentertainment.it/ as the active maintainer and later by another gentleman.
What does that mean for you, the user?
Actually, not much. Forget about “Pitchipoy”. Just get a modern version of Blender and the newest Rigify will be included inside it. I recommend the current stable version of Blender which you can get for free from https://www.blender.org/download/ .
Using Rigify (Pitchipoy or not 🙂 )
Then you’ll need to activate the addon and start using it. I have a whole series on that. A large portion of my course is available completely free on Youtube. A lot of what you’ll learn there relates to the changes added by Pitchipoy (although as I said, this name is not of particular importance anymore).
I also made more advanced examples and lessons and made them available for purchase. All info can be found HERE.
I found the article very impressive and thought-provoking.