bonelayers should have an extra layer just for boneshapes
Custom boneshapes are annoying. You always have to throw them on a trash layer so you don't accidentaly show them all when hitting alt-H. When you append/link a bunch of rigs for a large scene, and they each comes with a bunch of boneshapes, you often have to manually move them one at a time to a new layer and they just clutter up one layer of your scene for no reason at all.
If all rigs had a dedicated bonelayer for custom boneshapes it'd be awesome. It could be automatically hidden like bones when appending the rig, and you could easily klick, or bind the layer to a bone for visibility, when you needed it, and it'd be easy to find the right boneshapes to change then.
I'd love a layer that came with the rig, and was easy to hide, where you don't accidentaly show or delete the custom bones.
It would also be easy for beginners to use!
Actually it'd be nice if there were 2 layers, one custom bone layer, and one for lattices.
therefore: bonelayers should have an extra layer just for boneshapes (and maybe one for lattices too)
7 Comments
An alternative is making bone data the same as mesh data and having it editable, instead of having proxies hidden anywhere.
@draise14: Another possibility would be to have the bone shape use mesh data instead of object data. That way you could completely delete the source object and the armature would keep the mesh data.
@quargzon: Bone with mesh data, not object, still has an issue that you need preexisting mesh data. Youcould just have "editable mode" into the bone shape installed right to the bone, no proxy.
@draise14: Yeah, I thought about that. I'm just trying to come up with more possible approaches for Blender devs, because something's better than nothing. If they see the original proposal and decide it's too much work, I figure at least the bare minimum shouldn't be too hard to do for the meantime.
@quargzon: this is already possible. Delete the shape object, the shape data is still used by the bone. But when people do that it's a pain in case you want to edit the shapes for some reason (like reusing shapes on new bones). So the armature layer idea could keep the entire shape object for easier optional editing.
@R. Navega: Oh, I didn't think that would work since it references object data instead of mesh data. I stand corrected.
In that case, I agree that the next step up from what we have would be what you're suggesting.
@quargzon: Thinking some more, it could be a new button to 'instance' the shape data into a new object in your scene, so you can edit it. This actually should already be possible with an addon, as there's already addons for dealing with shapes, like this one: orient_custom_shape_V2 .
It's not difficult to write a script to create an empty object and assign mesh data to it, the data being from the bone shape you want to edit. I think this would be an easier battle to fight