[Bf-animsys] Import of Joints (issues with leaf bones)

[Gaia]

Hi;

When i try to import a rig (skeleton) from Maya (using collada)
then i get into troublebecause Maya supports Joints and
parent-child associations between joints.

It is straight forward and easy to translate a parent-child
association between 2 joints into one corresponding Blender
Bone with head and tail. In this casethe parent-joint defines
the bone-head, and the child-joint defines the bone-tail.

That does no longer work nicely when a joint has no more child
associations.In that case i can not find a straightforward
transformation to a Blender bone.

While the imported Joint still can define the bone-head, i
have to guess the bone-tail. Actually this is exactly what is
done right now when importing a skeletonfrom Collada. But
this approach never creates satisfying results.

So far i found 3 possible ways to get this fixed somehow:

- One straight forward solution would be to allow zero length
   bones (head==tail)in blender. But i guess this will result in
   very ugly issues. So i believe this solution has to be skipped
   right away.

- One other solution could be to introduce "Joints" as bones with
   head but no tail.Joints would need to contain a transformation
   matrix in that case. Actually this iscurrently my favorite
   solution.

- And the most ugly solution would be to create "Mini Bones"
   for leaf joints, that is: The bone tail is placed a tiny bit
   away from the bone head (0.001 Blender units for exmaple)
But then these bones would become very small and maybe you won't
   find them in the display. so this is also not a good solution :(

So what would make sense to you from the viewpoint of an animator ?
What would be a good working solution for this ?

And from a coder's point of view: What would be the best way to
solve thisissue ?

thanks,
Gaia