Helpful External Resources

There are many helpful guides and resources across the internet I'd love to share but I don't have the justification to just make a single page for each with just a link in it, so this is here as a list of various resources that have helped me in my processes! I'll be adding to this list over time.

Rigging Guides

GuiltyGear Xrd Development Staff Talk: Modeling for Skinning - A presentation by Arc System Work's dev team on various professional principles for "skinning" to help with weight painting and rigging overall.

GuiltyGear Xrd Development Staff Talk: Bone Placement Tips for Action - A presentation by Arc System Work's dev team, goes over ideal bone placements and common mistakes for bone positions that result in odd pivots.

Recommended Blender Addons ^{(that aren't CATS)}

TexTools (Free) - Excellent for creating good UVs, it's absurdly useful and I use it all the time. It has saved me multiple times when default Blender has failed in UV tools.

Abormal (Free) - A tool for editing vertex normals, incredibly useful for creating precise stylized shading.

Retopoflow (Free) - A tool for doing retopology in Blender, is incredibly useful and high quality.

EdgeFlow (Free) - Great for making nice curves among other things, I use this all the time.

F2 (also known as Spider Script) (Free) - Incredibly useful for my style of modeling, allows you to select a single corner vertex with two connecting vertexes to create a full face. This one is included by default in Blender, no extra downloads, you just need to enable it.

(here's a gif below of me using F2 and EdgeFlow in action)

SKkeeper (Free) - Allows you to keep shape keys when using modifiers such as the mirror modifier, I should heavily note that you should not entirely rely on it, it does not always work all the time.