[Bf-funboard] Empties in the bone hierarchy

Nathan Vegdahl cessen at cessen.com
Tue Mar 31 04:37:15 CEST 2009


(joe)
> Bone shapes are not a time problem, which any serious rigger will tell
> you.

   Eh... that's not entirely true.  It can take time to plan and
execute good bone shapes for rig controls.  Compared to the rest of
the rigging process it's certainly not a bottleneck.  But I also
wouldn't say it's insignificant.

(David Bryant)
> So, most pro rig rig controls use simple controls (boxes,
> circles,crosses,spheres).

   Most professionally produced rigs use simple shapes because the
riggers making them are either lazy, or are on too strict of deadlines
to make good control shapes.
   Sure, maybe 40-70% of the controls will make sense as simple
shapes, depending on the rig.  But to really make the rig both
visually clear and not visually overwhelming/cluttered, you have to
carefully design the appearance of many of the controls.  Most rigs I
see (including "pro" rigs from other packages and studios) fail hard
on this.  Frankly, my BBB rigs fail pretty hard on this too.  I'm
still learning.

   That said, having presets for common bone shapes (with tweakable
size+offsets) would be really handy, and would definitely speed up the
process.
   It would also be nice to be able to easily edit bone shapes in the
position/size they end up on the bone.  This can probably be done with
scripting, but it would be handy to have built-in.

--Nathan V


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