I needed a wolf for a scene I'm making in Blender and found a rigged on blendswap. I pose it how I want it, but the pose won't stick. If I save it and open the file again, it's back in the original unposed position. If I export it as an obj, it's in the unposed position. What am I missing? I'm working on a still image so I don't need animation.

Did you keyframe your pose in the timeline? Even though you aren't animating, if you make changes to the rig without setting keyframes, the rig will just return to the default rest pose every time you save or scrub along the timeline.

That's what I missed. No, I didn't do that. Thanks. I'll give it a try later.

Actually, I'm wrong about that. The pose should not reset, even without a keyframe. You should have to manually go to Pose>Transform>Clear Transform to reset the pose. The only thing that would cause it to reset is if there is already a keyframe in there for the first frame in the timeline. So make sure you don't have any keyframes on the rig that might cause it to reset back to that first frame pose again.

Okay, I got it to work. I moved it up to frame 10 and turned on auto keying. I posed the wolf. When I saved the file and reloaded it, it worked!

RedPhantom posted at 2:10PM Wed, 10 March 2021 - #4414701

Okay, I got it to work. I moved it up to frame 10 and turned on auto keying. I posed the wolf. When I saved the file and reloaded it, it worked!

Interesting. That's what I figured you would need to do at first, but then I went into one of my own rigs and removed all keyframes, posed the figure without any keyframes, then saved the file. It opened back up with that pose. So that's why I thought perhaps I was incorrect about that. I wonder if there was a keyframe or something on the first frame rest pose of your rig that maybe you aren't seeing? Either way, glad it worked.