Karelia Rig Update Rehearsal

A revised rig can affect more than the character file. Bone names, rest poses, animation targets and drivers can change across every shot that links to it.

Karelia Rig Update Rehearsal lets you test a direct linked-library replacement across saved Blender shots. It captures the original state, reloads the revised library in a separate candidate copy, reopens that copy through Blender's normal override resync, and compares the results. Your original shot and rig files remain untouched by the rehearsal.

• Compare added and removed rig objects and bones, bone parents, rest matrices and deformation flags.
• Review active actions, NLA tracks, animation target paths and driver changes.
• Identify unresolved animation paths, missing driver targets and invalid drivers at sampled frames.
• Compare evaluated world-space bone poses and sampled deformed mesh positions.
• Inspect per-shot findings, source integrity checks and simple before/after skeleton diagrams in a local HTML report.
• Keep JSON snapshots, worker logs and the candidate shot copies for further inspection.

NO DIFFERENCES means no differences were found in the completed, supported checks. REVIEW identifies changes that need an artist's judgment. BLOCKED flags errors such as removed bones or invalid animation targets. INCOMPLETE means the rehearsal could not finish. A sampled comparison is never a promise that an update is safe in every frame or production setup.

Install the ZIP through Blender's Get Extensions → Install from Disk. Select the original linked rig library, a separate revised library, your saved shot files and a new output location. Choose the frame sampling settings, run the rehearsal and review each shot's report. Rehearsals run in background Blender processes and can be cancelled. The extension does not apply the update to your original shots.

Tested on Windows with Blender 4.5.14 LTS and 5.2.2 LTS, using linked armatures, library overrides, actions, NLA, drivers and deformed meshes. Other operating systems and intermediate Blender versions have not been independently tested. No external Python packages, cloud service, account or subscription is required.

This release handles directly linked armature libraries in the active scene. Other scenes are not checked. Nested or indirect selected rig libraries are rejected. Workers disable automatic scripts and do not enable external add-ons; rigs depending on them require a different validation workflow.

Comparisons sample selected frames and mesh vertices. Unsampled motion or deformation differences can remain. Active simulation setups that may write caches are rejected before sampling and produce an incomplete rehearsal. Ordinary Geometry Nodes and cache-reading modifiers require additional visual review. Skeleton diagrams show an X/Z projection, not a rendered character comparison. Candidate copies continue to depend on the revised rig library and other external assets; they are rehearsal artifacts, not portable final deliveries.

Up to 50 shots can be rehearsed in one run, with up to 250 sampled frames per shot. Vertex samples and per-shot timeouts are configurable. Full scene loading and evaluation can still require substantial memory and disk space.

The installable extension, an English quickstart, documented limits and troubleshooting guidance. Completed shot workers compare source-file hashes before and after their checks; cancelled or crashed workers do not count as completed integrity checks. Reports may contain local paths and shot names, so review them before sharing.

One-time purchase. Local processing. No telemetry.

Support: [email protected]. Version 0.1.0, GPL-3.0-or-later. Independent Karelia Labs software.