[Bf-funboard] Empties in the bone hierarchy

Roland Hess rolandh at reed-witting.com
Mon Mar 30 13:59:23 CEST 2009


I really don't see how rolling Empties into the bone hierarchy gains you 
a thing. From a development standpoint, stuff like this is looked at not 
from the perspective "I don't like how this works -- I'll put this in 
here and rearrange that and add this" but "What is the underlying problem?"

In this case, is it that you find rigging with bones tedious because of 
a limited set of quickly accessible draw types? If that's the case, is 
it even a good idea to add a bunch of extra draw types (or even use the 
Empty draw types)? How widespread and useful would this be? Would this 
be the better approach, or is it trivial to create for yourself a small 
set of reference objects that are linked into your .b.blend for access 
with the current way of doing things? Or to even include such a tiny 
addition into the default .b.blend?

I haven't really thought about the issue, so I'm not sure which of these 
would end up being the best solution to the problem, but as someone who 
is familiar with the character animation code, I can tell you that 
rolling Empties into the Armature code is NOT the way to go.

If the issue is one of functionality, not just looks, then what Fweeb 
(who is too modest) suggested is the correct way to go. Take a look at 
what object-level animation functionality is missing from bones, and, if 
appropriate and useful, add that to the bone functionality (hooks, curve 
control, force fields, etc.). Also, with the Dope Sheet in 2.5, if you 
choose to use Empties for control objects on your characters, you'll be 
able to do so and see everything in an Action Editor-style screen.

Roland
harkyman


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