Add ability to customize the roll axis of bones
Applications like Unreal have built a lot of their systems (mirroring, manipulators) around the idea that bones on opposite sides (left vs right) will have their forward vector (or roll axis) inverted (pointing in the other direction).
Blender on the other hand is designed around the fact that bones will always point along Y+. Trying to fight that is not only resulting in a contrived setup workflow but also does not play well within the Blender eco-system (envelopes, display, weights, etc.).
Although this is likely a big feature request, it seems that the most elegant solution to this problem would be to offer the ability to set the bone forward vectors individually and have Blender understand all that.
5 Comments
I have said this on another post. This is literally the only feature barring me from switching to blender completely. As a professional rigger this is a nightmare to deal especially considering the use of any legacy assets. Yes there are conversion scripts, but i want the option during rig building. I don't use auto riggers. I build my rigs from scratch. I may want the local rotation of my bone to be offset from the direction of the chain. In blender things are controlled with bones. Which is essentially a transform node with a head and tail. Just lose the head and tail nonsense. Add the ability to change the local rotation axis to anything you want.
Yes, this one pleeease. As a professional working with an in-house engine. We desperately need this. Now, I know someones gonna say "you can import your rig with a certain orientation and export it with proper orientation it will work". No, it is a huuuge difference in the workflow when you're working with 30+ artists and working with a project which is transitioning from Autodesk tools.
THIS. We are a studio considering to move our pipeline from Autodesk. In Maya we are able to set our rigs up in a way, that all keyframes are copyable, this is possible because of all 3 axis are fully customizable. With not being able to edit the bone roll y axis in Blender, the animation process is a nightmare when switching from Maya. Are there any plugins/scripts out there that help us, while we wait for this feature?
I wanted to point out that the
Primary Bone AxisFBX exporter option does not seem to make any difference on the receiving end. In my case, Unreal Engine.So far, this is the biggest defect with Blender as an animation tool for me. This would resolve nearly every problem I face in the game creation I do. Please implement it!