Tapered Bendy Bones
Bendy Bones are great for easily achieving complex deformation, but they are also a favorite display mode for riggers because it is possible to control how thick they appear in the viewport.
In the default Octahedral mode, many of these bones would overlap and be difficult to select:
The one drawback of BBone display is that the bones are completely square so they don't indicate the "direction" of the bone well.
But what if bendy bones had a little bit of a taper at their tail (the end of the bone)? This could make BBones the ultimate display mode for rigging. We'd get all of their benefits and avoid their weakness.
And the best part is that someone already demonstrated this is possible. In the video below Blender artist philo vivero shows his implementation of tapered BBones.
This is done by tweaking the blender code and compiling from scratch so it's not something that we can all play with.
But if we just get the blessing of the Blender devs, this has the chance of making it into an official Blender release.
I also made a video explainer about this proposal:
4 Comments
I like the idea, i often find the B-Bones display unusable as it lacks visual feedback of bone direction and easily hides bones behind or within each other, and yet necessary because it's the only one showing bendy bones subdivision.
I'd like to take it even further:
Looking at the first video, I understand that he made the "B-Bone display" tapered, not just the "bendy bones subdivision", so you wouldn't see the difference between regular bones and bones subdivided by the bendy-bone feature.
Which is exactly how things are right now with the current B-Bone display, but I'd hope one day for bendy bones to be not only distinguishable from regular bones, but also not limited to only B-Bone display.
I like this idea a lot!!
Love the idea! Maybe even with an option to toggle between per segment tapering and just tapering the entire bone.
👍👍👍