hi there. It would be nice if Mr.Magee himself could reply to this one, but any help will do.

I thought the horse animation article in the 3d world magazine was nice, but I decided I would go the extra step and start from scratch and rig the beast so I had a better grasp of the whole thing.
I´m finding problems with the proxy object, because the auto-generated proxy is quite disappointing, and someone at odforce told me that in most cases I won´t want to go with it, so my question is, how is the proxy object used at the article generated? It´s obviously not enough to just polyreduce the final object because I need the same group names along the proxy object so that the animation rig works with it.
How was the proxy object at the magazine generated? I can´t see any hints using the article start scene.

I also don't like the gaps created by the auto-proxy so what I do is to find out what the group names were for each of the body parts then assign those groups one by one. It is a bit of extra work but it lets me keep the proxy geometry gapless. In the end I save the geometry out as a bgeo which keeps the groups intact. Then when this geometry is loaded up in the autorig tool it is used as the proxy geometry.

To get the group names I just used the auto-proxy then checked out the names using that geometry.

Robert