Proxy rig's

Hey everyone, i’ve been trying to become a animator with blender for awhile now. And i’ve been reading on Proxy rig’s.
So correct me if i’m wrong here, but a proxy rig is in a nutshell a rig that you can continuously animate even if there are gonna be additional changes to the model (texture’s, materials) and it will still retain it’s animation?

I apologies in advanced if this is a ignorant question to ask.

You’ve almost got it right. A proxy is a stand-in.

Changes can be made to any rigged model without affecting its animation as long as no changes are made to the armature, whether using one file for all or when linking into a separate file.

A proxy rig would be the armature (and usually mesh or meshes too) linked into a separate “scene” file. Then one can animate the character (or whatever) proxy in the scene file while others work on the model in its linked original file at the same time. The scene file proxies will update to any changes made in their linked (original) files when the scene file gets opened. So a change made to an object in its original file will propagate to all its proxies in all the scene files in the whole production.

Scene files often have most everything (characters, props, sets, whatever) linked in as proxies from other files. You can also have files linked into a linked file. Proxies of proxies. One example would be props linked into a set file which is linked into a scene file.

You’ll also see the term proxy rig used (loosely) instead of proxy mesh. A proxy mesh in this case (for an armature) is a low-resolution mesh controlled by the same armature as the high-res mesh. So one can do most of the animation work with the low-res for better viewport performance and switch to the high-res mesh for animation cleanup and rendering.

Hmmm, 16 posts. In case nobody else said it… Welcome to BlenderArtists.org.

-LP

Yes, “proxy” is another term that has some ambiguous colloquial meanings when you encounter it in conversation, although its intended Blender meaning is fairly specific.

When you add a link, it refers to another file by name, and Blender literally opens that file to retrieve the requested data from it. It uses the data “as it is, where it is.” This is why, when the source-file is updated for any reason, the change will immediately be visible everywhere: because there is one source for this data, namely the (only) file in which it appears. So, there’s “only one source of Truth.”

Proxies, then, are a practical way to handle the “local, per-file” differences … the linked object’s location “here,” or animations and so-forth that are to take place “here,” and so on. The way that it works is that certain information attached to the proxy, and stored in the file in which the proxy appears, supplements or supersedes the information that’s drawn from the library file (according to rules that the library-file owner can dictate).

They way I like to think of Proxies in Blender is as if you were Hypertext linking on the internet… you have one user who is the modeler… another who is working with Rigging… another doing Textureing, Backgrounds, Objects, Lighting Compositing… etc… and everyone is working on all this stuff at the same time… just like if you were to link your webpage to someone else’s… you might link to an Artical on another site… and that site might update that artical every now and again… and when it does… your site is able to access the latest update… Thus the same with Proxy links in Blender…

Anyway thinking of it as kind of like Hyper links helps me relate to how it works…

hope I didn’t make it more confusing… LOL!:spin::yes::frowning: