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  • Published 7 May 2018

X-Ray mode for Armatures

EDIT: Marking as done. As of today, toggling the x-ray mode (shortcut: ⇧ Shift Z ) while in pose mode have the desired effect:

demo gif



Since multi-object editing is coming, I can't stop thinking about future possibilities for animation in Blender. One of them being to animate several armatures (like two characters interacting with each other) in the simplest way possible.

With that new possibility will come a new problematic: how to use armature x-ray display quickly and easily. Until now we just had to open an armature's display setting and check the x-ray options. But it's kind of slow, especially with multiple armatures.

But there is a nice feature in Maya called "X-Ray Joints" ("joints" are Maya's "bones") :

xray joints

(photo credit: tutsplus.com )

This is basically a drawing option, consisting of drawing all armatures in x-ray mode. It's a 2-click solution (or a one-keyboard-shortcut), no matter how much armatures are here. Still faster than the usual way, even with just one armature). And for those willing to x-ray only one armature, the usual way. On a practical P.O.V., this could look like this :

xray armatures

  • Enabling or disabling this would respectively enable or disable x-ray of every armature, no matter how they were set.
  • When this option is enabled, should the armature's x-ray options be greyed out ?
  • To me, it's a shading option, bu since it could be used in rendered mode too, should it be placed in another pop-over, like "Overlay"...?

Thx for making Blender awesome.

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Development Status: Done

Upvote 6 Downvote 1
Lauloque
7 May 2018

7 Comments

Lauloque Author

I notice a similar feature - but for wireframe - is planned .

dpdpforlife

Your wish is granted at around 2:10:

New Armature Display - Blender 2.8 Code Quest

Lauloque Author

It's not global.

dpdpforlife

This is not a bad idea. There is work going on right now that works towards this goal. T54949

dpdpforlife

@dpdpforlife: More specifically, This task T54983 assigned to jbakker uses the z key to toggle this display mode for armatures.

luciano

Actually that goes in the "overlay" panel, and it already exists in 2.79 but as an armature property, i doubt the'll take it away.

Lauloque Author

I think you did not understand what I'm talking about.

I'm not talking about the x-ray checkbox in an armature's display tab, I know it's already there and I even talk about it in the second paragraph. The problem of that option is that it's per-object based and not accessible within the viewport.

What I'm talking about is a way to toggle on/off ALL armatures 's x-ray view. And that does not exist for now in Blender while it's there for years in other major animation softwares like Maya.