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  • Published 1 Jun 2024

Linkable Modifiers, Constraints, and Drivers

Proposal: Make Modifiers, Constraints, and Drivers linkable, just like meshes and materials.

They already have names to facilitate this; Just pick the setup you want with the same name (With an option to flip the targets from .L to .R ideally, or a more dynamic target like children or the parent) except drivers. I feel like drivers in general need work, but being able to name and share common drivers would be a great start.

Consider a Blender where this is possible. You have a rig for a human hand, and you want each joint to copy the rotation of the parent joint, so they curl easier. You make a single constraint, targeting the parent of the bone. Each joint has this linked modifier. Just one constraint.

Currently to do this you need a constraint on each joint. Say a finger has 3 joints, that's 24 constraints for a pair of hands, and you'd have to select them all, remember to hold alt, before editing them, even though they are all almost identical in function. And that's assuming you know about holding alt to mass edit things! If you dont, you have to edit each one... every time.

This feature wouldn't just be useful for rigs of course, but I believe this is a huge reason everyone uses Rigify rather than rigging manually. It's a huge pain to set up a rig manually, even when you know what you're doing, and then you can't even change any of it without huge amounts of work. IK's are modifiers! You can't have two characters with the same rig and edit both their IK's identically! Why!

Consider also marking Modifiers as assets, say, for a specific setup for making inverse hull outlines on models. It's quite a pain to import stuff and delete it once you've copied its modifiers over.

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Development Status: Open

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omega
1 Jun 2024

1 Comment

lobo_alcalino

I'd say that, how things are going nowadays, it's more powerful to make geometry nodes to handle armature. Then you can make what ever node groups you need about this.

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