Display bones as joints for better sync with game engines
old-school blender users will probably hate me for this suggestion. But every game engine and almost every other additional software uses a joint system (that creates every bone only between two joints in the hierarchy but does not keep bone head and tail as separate independent elements ). The difference between Blender armature and all the other systems creates a lot of confusion when working on non-internal projects for export. Especially it creates a lot of trouble with game engines. It would be nice to have at least a display option that will show the armature as the traditional joints-based skeleton, so riggers/animators see what they do the same way it will be exported and seen in engines
5 Comments
it kinda does:
Just use custom shape with some generic "join" shape that you like.
Not quite. The joints should be connected to display their place in a hierarchy. Cause seeing the right hierarchy matters a lot when you create a clean model for game dev. Most of blender users freelancers provide "dirty" models with scale issues, extra rotations on the root, additional root, and wrong hierarchies (missing some bones). These problems are so common that we decided to refuse blender users in a job to avoid those problems and save time on fixes. It hurts me, cause Blender has a lot of good features. But compatibility is a pain. And I bet the problem is hidden in a very unique structure of Blender armature. It makes Blender incompatible with the other programs. And yep, you can go with a lot of tricks and extra plugins for import-export, memorizing thousands of settings: the position of the root, features of blender joints hierarchy, fix the code to avoid blender of exporting Armature as an additional root bone, etc. But let us be honest, it should not be this way. The artist at least should be able to see what he gonna import.
True.
Also when exporting Blender's armatures to somewhere else, it often creates an additional bone replacing the armature object itself, sometimes causing issues with softwares that expect one and only root joint.
thats totally unrelated issue. Its exporters fault. You use eg. better fbx exporter it does not have that problem. (kinda costly solution for that trivial problem :p)
It is related: all the issues you point out in your post come from Blender's way of describing armatures and bones.
Better FBX exporter just so happen to try to fix the issue for you, just as it could also try to fix the issue that Blender considers bones as two-points entities instead of one. And some exporters do, to some extent. That's why you have all these options in blender's fbx importer: