~If your wondering how I did it, I basically took the original rig ported from SFM and modified it with Rigify which is a free addon preinstalled with Blender. It allows you to make rigs that can do a number of features used in the animation industry such as bone tweaking or changing the pivot of an IK. The rest of this article will basically summarize the process on how I created the new rig.
~ I started by getting the ported rig from SFM and modifying it into a meta rig which is essentially a blueprint Rigify uses to create new rigs.
^ Ported Rig from SFM
^ Meta rig
~The only difference between the ported rig and the final is the eyes. In TF2, the eyes are rendered as a shader and not as a separate mesh, meaning you can't actually rotate the eyeball itself as its just a flat plane with an eye texture on it. One idea I though could solve this is to rig the UV map of the eye to a bone, but since the iris would stretch whenever you closed or stretch the eyelids, I ended up removing the original eye and replacing it with a separate eye mesh just to save myself time.
~ With the meta rig done, I then generated the rig and tested it to make sure everything was working. I also needed to go back and create bone layers so it was easier to hide groups of bones easier when needed.
~After that, I went in to organize all of the shape keys since it was quite a mess and hard to tell where each shape key was. To make organizing easier, I used Shape Keys+ to order the individual shape keys into their designated categories so it wasn't a cluster of shape keys in one place. I did consider making bones that can manipulate the shape keys without needing to go back and forth from the rig, but since there were just too many shape keys to manage, I put it aside since I was a bit too complicated to work on and would have required a lot of python coding.
~And that about sums it up. This in total took around 5 to 6 hours (excluding breaks) with the majority of the work being done on the rig itself since Valve was such a dear to me :)~Special thanks to The Idiotic Medic for giving me a port of the Demoman with the cosmetics. Go follow him on Twitter!
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